One of the biggest water polluters in our country is the factory farm. In 2008, a Government Accountability Office report panned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to know where most of these farms were located, let alone if they were releasing their manure into rivers, lakes, and streams.

So in early 2011, the EPA announced a rule asking such farms, known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs, to submit basic information, like their address and how many animals they have, to the agency. On Friday, July 20, EPA quietly announced it was withdrawing that rule, planning instead to try to collect the data from the existing records held by states, even though it has tried that before, with poor results.

In trying to understand why the EPA would back off such a seemingly innocuous yet important data collection project, I imagined myself inside a meeting of EPA clean water officials as they made the decision to withdraw the rule.

Official One (storms into room, slams hand on table): I wish those House Republicans would all go on a schmoozy farm tour and fall into a manure lagoon! I can’t believe they accused us of flying spy drones over American farms.

Official Two (looking worn): Well, we are flying planes over factory farms in Nebraska and Iowa.

Official One: Or if we check up on them with flyovers, where we can see manure flowing into waterways.

Official Two: Well, our work will get a little easier when we at least know how many factory farms there are, how many animals they have, where they are located, and how they manage their manure. I mean, how can we regulate the biggest source of water pollution in the country if we don’t even know where they are?

Official One: Yeah, I’m glad we’re going to release that rule requiring CAFOs to report those details to us soon. We’ve been working at getting better intel on them for over a decade!

Enter Official Three.

Official Three (looking dejected): Hi guys.

Officials One and Two: Hey.

Official Three: So … you know how it’s an election year, and those Nebraska senators just gave us a bunch of shit for the aerial flights over CAFOs? That’s not playing too well in the farm belt.

Official One: But these guys are in an industrial occupation! Their cows, pigs, and chickens produce three times as much poop as all Americans every year. And we don’t even know where it’s going! Not knowing where they’re located or what they are doing with their waste is like not knowing where sewage treatment plants are located, and if they are following the correct protocol for managing waste.

Official Three: Well, it’s just going to have to wait. We’re going to withdraw our rule requiring CAFOs to report basic data.

Official Two: People who care about clean water are going to be pissed.

Official Three: Well, we are going to try and work with the states to gather that information from them.

Official Three: I know, but it’s really the only option right now. So deal with it. We’re going to work with the Association of Clean Water Administrators to get the data on CAFOs from states, and maybe this time around it will be a little better.

It’s not like anyone gives a damn about clean water when they’re about to run out of unemployment insurance anyway. If you don’t like it, move to the Netherlands. They regulated their dairy CAFOs so strict that half of them moved over here.

Official Two: Okay. So let me get this straight. We’re withdrawing our proposal to collect information about addresses, contact details, animal numbers, and manure management on 20,000 of the nation’s most polluting farms, even though we have a legal agreement with three major environmental groups saying we will do this?

Official Three: Yes. But maybe we’ll release the withdrawal notice late on a Friday, after everyone’s left the office.

Conservation is an important part of federal farm funding — the laws that shape what, where, and how we grow our food. And yet, if the negotiations around the 2012 Farm Bill go as predicted, funding for conservation is in grave danger.

Why does conservation on farms matter? Well, for starters, most large-scale agriculture is a disruptive endeavor. It requires farmers to plow under native flora and replace it with giant monocultures of annual crops, and then coddle those crops by irrigating them and applying fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides — all ecologically damaging technologies.

There are ways to farm better, to wash away less soil and use fewer dangerous chemicals. But farming with a lighter footprint often costs more than it brings in, and until around the last decade, federal policy has done little to inspire conservation. Instead, farm subsidies encourage farmers to plant crops fencerow to fencerow with little regard to environmental impacts.

In 2002, though, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) began a program aimed a shifting the balance towards conservation. The shift continued after the 2008 Farm Bill, and the new program — the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), which pays farmers to implement measures that reduce erosion and chemical drift, minimize fertilizer runoff, and improve habitat for native pollinators — has grown every year. It’s now the most widespread conservation program in the country.

Farmers enrolled in CSP make seemingly small changes that can have a big impact over time. They may purchase new spray nozzles to reduce the amount of chemicals that drift into the air or water. Or they might plant borders around their fields to make homes for pollinators, implement no-till farming (which reduces soil erosion), or regularly test plants to finely calibrate their fertilizer usage. Ranchers and forest managers can also get into the conservation stewardship game, by agreeing to use techniques like rotating livestock so they don’t overgraze or planting buffers along riparian areas to enhance stream habitat.

None of this might sound radical, but the thing is — until recently — the most popular federal conservation program was one with the opposite strategy. The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) paid farmers to stop doing their jobs — to take land out of production. While CRP has earned accolades from wildlife preservation groups and halted much soil erosion, its impacts were necessarily limited to the marginal land that farmers could spare, and it had no effect on lands under production.

The CSPfocus on working lands is a relatively new twist, supported by both sustainable agriculture advocates and production-oriented farmers. “(It) rewards farmers for doing the right thing rather than just pursuing the highest return possible from government farm programs,” said Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, a group that works to push sustainable agriculture incentives in U.S. farm policy.

And CSP has proven popular since widespread enrollment options were offered, after the 2008 Farm Bill. It surpassed the reserve program this year, at 37 million acres.

Corn growing on wheat residue in a conservation plot.Photo: International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center“There was record turnout for the first signup … and it’s been really successful.” says Brad Redlin, director of conservation programs for the Izaak Walton League of America. Redlin likes the program because it doesn’t discriminate based on size and it lets farmers enroll regardless of whether they’re growing strawberries or soybeans.

Each state gets an allocation of acres under the program, and sets conservation priorities, like reducing erosion or improving water quality. Then, farmers compete for who can promise the most environmental benefits [PDF] on their land. The highest-ranking farms win CSP contracts, until the acreage cap for the state is reached. (The Natural Resources Conservation Service, the USDA agency that administers the program, grades the applications.)Five percent of those acres are also set aside for beginning farmers and ranchers, and another 5 percent for socially disadvantaged or limited resource applicants.

Once a farmer wins a contract, he or she is paid yearly on a per-acre basis for a five-year term. Payouts must average $18 per acre. Cropland rates run around $24 per acre, and rangeland around $4.

Carl Mattson, a Montana pea and wheat farmer, enrolled his 4,000 acres in 2004, when the program kicked off following the 2002 Farm Bill. He has implemented a number of conservation practices, including no-till and pesticide reduction. Mattson said his enrollment began during a 10-year drought when crops were doing poorly. During those lean years, he said, the income from CSP was a “very high” percentage of his total farm revenue.

“CSP allowed us to continue to maintain what we were doing conservation-wise and even allowed us to explore additional activities,” he says. Investing in these practices can mean buying pricey new equipment or sustaining less productive fields while they learn a new system, he adds. The payments help make surviving the transition possible.

In 2008, the USDA made some important changes to the program, some good, like expanding its scope, and others that both Mattson and Hoefner criticize. Now, instead of paying farmers who are already conservation-minded, the application process weights its scoring in favor of farmers adopting new practices.

“The old mantra for the early (2002) program was ‘reward the best and motivate the rest,'” says Mattson. But under the new system, farmers already practicing conservation have less of a chance to win contracts.

“That, unfortunately, has had the effect of keeping the best conservation farmers out of the program,” says Hoefner.

While some might see why the government wouldn’t want to pay farmers for something they’re already doing, Mattson says the program works better that way. When the program began, farmers like him, who were already practicing no-till, won contracts because of their early adoption. But after that, many farmers in his county who did not win contracts switched to no-till, in hopes that they’d win a contract. “You got over 50 percent of the farmers to change their practices without one single federal dollar, just because they wanted to be in line for the next go-round,” he says.

Now those farmers will not win contracts — unless they can promise to add still more new conservation practices. And that’s something Mattson and Hoefner would like to see changed in the next Farm Bill.

If the stewardship program shrinks in size, fewer acres will be farmed carefully. Or, conversely, we’ll lose more soil from our farmlands and we’ll see an increase in pesticides and fertilizer use.

Since switching to no-till, farmer Mattson has seen significant ecological improvements on his farm. His ponds no longer fill with soil from erosion. He uses less fertilizer, because his soil is healthier (and full of earthworms), and less fuel, because he doesn’t need to till as much.The Conservation Stewardship Program is working — for him, for farmers on 4 percent of the nation’s cropland, and for the air, water, and land it aims to protect.

“It’s an expensive program.” Mattson says, but, he adds, “if conservation is what the American public wants, this is a premier program to do it.”

]]>tiller_corn_husks-180x150.jpgtillercorn on wheat residueRanchers struggle against giant meatpackers and economic troubleshttp://grist.org/food/2011-04-14-ranchers-struggle-against-giant-meatpackers-economic-troubles/
http://grist.org/food/2011-04-14-ranchers-struggle-against-giant-meatpackers-economic-troubles/#commentsFri, 15 Apr 2011 01:48:28 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-04-14-ranchers-struggle-against-giant-meatpackers-economic-troubles/]]>All cattle, no hats.Photo: Rob CrowA sea of cream-colored cowboy hats, the kind ranchers wear on their days off, fills a sterile conference room at the Fort Collins Marriott. Banners from groups like the Ranchers-Cattlemen Legal Action Fund and the Western Organization of Resource Councils add bright slashes of color, and warn that JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, now controls 24 percent of all cattle produced in the United States. It’s August 2010, the night before a national workshop on competition in the livestock industry, and well over 500 ranchers, feedlot owners, and their allies are packed into this room to talk about change.

Word spreads that I want to hear their stories. We all know they’re harassed by many demons: Land, feed, and fuel costs have all soared. Newly health-conscious consumers disdain red meat; environmentalists regularly sue over grazing practices. Retail giants like Walmart grab an increasing share of any profits. The price a rancher gets for beef, adjusted for inflation, dropped from $1.97 to 93 cents per pound between 1980 and 2009.

Today, though, the ranchers are focused on a different villain, and one after another, they pull me aside to tell different versions of the same tale. They talk about the meatpackers’ power — how it’s become nearly impossible to make a living as a small operator, because the meatpackers no longer buy much from small operators. It’s harder and harder to get a fair price for cattle, they say, and the meatpackers that slaughter and process the beef conspire to make it so.

Bill Bullard, president of the Montana-based Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF), mounts the podium like a preacher and rallies the crowd. “Our cattle industry is shrinking,” Bullard booms. “Folks, these are signs of an unhealthy industry. An industry in severe crisis.” He’s one of many who raise the specter of the nation’s chicken and hog industries, in which once-independent farmers are now treated more like meatpackers’ employees.

Close to 2,000 people show up at the next day’s workshop, held at nearby Colorado State University and sponsored by the U.S. departments of Agriculture and Justice. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack fields questions about the meatpackers and cites a grim statistic: The number of U.S. cattle producers has plummeted from 1.6 million in 1980 to 950,000 today. Vilsack doesn’t directly blame the meatpackers, but says, “We can’t continue these trends, because if we do, we’re going to end up with a handful of farmers, a handful of packers, a handful of processors, a handful of grocery stores, and at that point, the consumers will suffer as well.”

It’s a chord that twangs mournfully throughout U.S. agriculture, as a traditional rural way of life appears to take its last, sad, shuddery breaths. But the ranchers haven’t given up hope. In fact, many speakers thank the Obama administration for showing more guts than previous administrations — Democrat or Republican — and finally standing up to the meatpacking industry.

The rise of the meatpackers began in the 1880s — an era, in the words of the Federal Trade Commission, “when the modern American meat industry was in its infancy.” Back then, John Rockefeller was building the Standard Oil empire as other powerful men became railroad and steel barons. The “Big Five” meatpacking companies controlled 45 percent of the domestic cattle market by the early 1890s. Every Tuesday at 2 p.m., their representatives met in downtown Chicago to decide how many cattle each would bring to the marketplace. This illegal act of collusion — which kept meat prices high by limiting supply — was known as the Veeder Pool, because the meatpackers’ attorney, Henry Veeder, kept records for the meetings and later testified about them in Congress. The Veeder Pool and similar dodgy arrangements put the squeeze on ranchers, whose cattle decreased in quality and value as the packers held them back from the market.

The big meatpackers were mostly able to evade enforcement of the 1890 federal Sherman Antitrust Act. Whenever the pressure got too strong, the companies would play legal hide-and-seek, merging or dissolving to avoid prosecution. Even when trust-busting President Teddy Roosevelt took office, the companies retained their power. Upton Sinclair, a leading muckraker, described the power of the “Beef Trust” in his classic 1906 novel, The Jungle:

It was the incarnation of blind and insensate Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs … it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh … it wiped out thousands of businesses every year, it drove men to madness and suicide. It had forced the price of cattle so low as to destroy the stock-raising industry … it had ruined butchers who refused to carry its products. It divided the country into districts, and fixed the price of meat in all of them …

Spurred by that book and cattlemen’s complaints, in 1918 the FTC found “evidence of two generations of combined effort on the part of the American meat packers, particularly the Armour, Swift, and Morris families, to control an ever increasing part of the food of the American people.” The meatpackers were “skilled in concealing” their collusion and maintained “the appearance of competition,” the FTC said.

Congress tried to crack down with the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act, which forbade packers from engaging in “unjust, unfair, or discriminatory practices” against livestock sellers. At the time the law was passed, “it was viewed as providing the most complete oversight of any sector of the economy,” says Neil Harl, an Iowa State University economist and lawyer who has studied it extensively. Yet the meatpackers’ grip simply tightened, as they used “intense political pressure” to ward off the Agriculture Department regulators, says Harl. “Whether it was a Republican administration or a Democratic administration, there was not a lot of effort … to implement the full measure.”

While there have been fluctuations — meatpacker concentration hit a low point in 1977 — mergers in the ’80s began a tidal wave of consolidation that leaves meatpackers with nearly double the power they wielded 120 years ago. Four giant companies — Tyson, Cargill, Brazil-based JBS, and National Beef — now control about 80 percent of the U.S. beef market.

More than 200 ag groups and a bipartisan bunch of senators from cattle and hog states — Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) — persuaded Congress to crack down again in 2008. Language inserted in the Farm Bill directed the Department of Agriculture to devise new rules that establish more clearly when the Packers and Stockyards Act is being violated. The USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyard Administration (GIPSA, pronounced “jipsa”) proposed rules last June, and the feds are evaluating more than 60,000 public comments. Prominent Obama administration officials focused on the issue include Secretary Vilsack, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the head of GIPSA, J. Dudley Butler. He’s a farmer and lawyer from Mississippi, who was a founding member of the reform-minded nonprofit Organization for Competitive Markets and an R-CALF member. Butler keeps a low profile, but when he was appointed in May 2009, he said he was coming to Washington, D.C., “to enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act.”

Photo: Mark Kjerland & super.heavy via flickrTalk with healthy-food advocates in urban centers across the country, and frequently, you’ll hear the same story. It goes something like this:

Once upon a time, this city was full of grocery stores. Then came urban renewal/an economic downturn/a mass exodus of the wealthy and, one by one, the groceries closed up and moved to the outskirts of the city. Since then, there have been Safeways/Krogers/Publix that have set up shop here and there, but they all end up leaving. Now we have 100 liquor stores for 25,000 people in this part of town, and the closest these stores come to selling fruit is the Arbor Mists in the drink cooler.

Thus, the United States has ended up with so-called “food deserts,” low-income enclaves that lack easy access to grocery stores selling healthy food and fresh produce.

It’s not only the biggest cities that have lost their grocery stores. While it’s hard to find a good grocer in parts of Atlanta and New York City, fresh veggies can be equally difficult to come by in places like Durham, N.C.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Nashville, Tenn.

According to Miriam Liebovitz of Community Food Advocates, a Nashville organization working to increase access to healthy food, carless residents of South Nashville must frequently take multiple buses and spend hours in transit to the nearest supermarket. “We’re working on getting policy incentives, tax and building incentives, to try and get grocery stores into Nashville neighborhoods,” she says.

Marketing justice

The work done by organizations like Community Food Advocates falls under the phrase du jour “food justice,” a term that’s all about equity, says Oran Hesterman, an agronomist and food systems expert who now heads up Detroit’s Fair Food Network. Those working for food justice believe people should have equitable access to healthy food, equitable opportunities to produce such food, and equitable chances to find living-wage jobs in the food and agriculture system.

Hesterman, like others in the food-justice field, see problems like skyrocketing obesity rates and diabetes as symptoms of a broken food system in need of extensive rebuilding. Their research shows that “the symptoms of that broken system show up in our low-income communities quicker and more harshly,” he says.

Alison Alkon, a sociologist at California’s University of the Pacific who studies the food-justice movement, likens it to the fight for environmental justice that sprung to life in the 1970s, when low-income communities and communities of color realized they were being hit with a double environmental whammy — extra exposure to toxic operations on the one side, and lower access to environmental amenities like parks and clean air on the other.

These residents also say they want what most people already have easy access to — a full-service grocery store in their neighborhood that would offer a wide range of products for one-stop shopping.

But like environmental justice issues, the causes and impacts of lack of access to food frequently have multiple historic causes, ranging from structural racism to poor urban planning.

“Planners did not actively try to make neighborhoods underserved … but by certain planning decisions, the end result was the same,” says Samina Raja, a planner at the University at Buffalo.

Due to a push from activists and local communities, planners are starting to include food access in how they manage city planning, but there’s a ways to go, says Raja. “Not having paid attention to food for several decades, we’re in a pretty dire situation in terms of disparities and justice.”

As the country’s obesity epidemic looms large and Michelle Obama continues to push healthy food initiatives, numerous cities have started to think about how lack of access to healthy food can affect the health of their residents, and thus reduce the amount of money they spend on healthcare for diet-related problems.

“Ultimately, it’s the best preventative medicine we have — eating healthy,” suggests Hesterman, pointing to efforts like Pennsylvania’s Fresh Food Financing Initiative, which provides incentives for grocery stores to open in underserved, low-income areas, as a model cities around the country are looking to follow.

Declaration of independents

Building grocery stores in an underserved area is one concrete step toward making access to food more equitable, but it’s neither a simple task nor a straightforward solution.

As with many young social movements, there is tension between what the activists — who often come from outside the impacted communities — seek, and what those experiencing the problem view as the cure.

Activists often push to create (frequently small) independent grocery stores, cooperatively- and community-owned, or to get fresh produce in existing corner stores through programs such as Healthy in a Hurry in Louisville, Ky., and the Healthy Bodegas Initiative in New York City.

Research and focus groups completed by Hesterman’s Fair Food Network, the Oakland research group PolicyLink, and academics like sociologist Alkon, however, show that many residents of low-income neighborhoods do not yet use the alternative venues offered by food justice groups. These residents also say they want what most people already have easy access to — a full-service grocery store in their neighborhood that would offer a wide range of products for one-stop shopping.

West Oakland, Calif., is one of the few communities to have successfully created a small-scale cooperative grocery stores. Thus far, it’s received a positive response from the community, says James Berk, one of seven worker-owners at Mandela Foods Cooperative. The marketplace, located across the street from a major public transportation hub, stocks fresh and organic produce and offers classes on cooking and nutrition.

This video from PolicyLink celebrates Mandela’s first year in operation:

As you can see, Mandela looks very different from a standard grocery store, with bulk bins selling organic beans, grains, and dry goods taking up prime real estate in the space. At 2,500 square feet, it’s about the size of a corner store, although it takes a strong stance against selling liquor.

]]>http://grist.org/article/food-2010-10-05-would-a-walmart-solve-oaklands-and-nashvilles-food-problems/feed/2desertshopping.jpgCan Oakland plant a policy revolution to match its grassroots efforts?http://grist.org/article/food-can-oakland-plant-a-policy-revolution-to-match-its-grassroots-ef/
http://grist.org/article/food-can-oakland-plant-a-policy-revolution-to-match-its-grassroots-ef/#commentsWed, 08 Sep 2010 02:04:34 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/food-can-oakland-plant-a-policy-revolution-to-match-its-grassroots-ef/]]>One of City Slicker Farms’ tiny but productive sites in West Oakland, California. Much of the produce is grown vertically, to maximize space, and there’s a chicken coop tucked in the back corner. Photo courtesy of Anne Hamersky, from the forthcoming book Farm Together Now

Giant cranes guard the waterfront on the port city of Oakland, California’s western flank, brashly broadcasting the city’s industrial past and present to all who fly in, drive by, or walk through one of the Bay Area’s grittiest urban locales.

Yet in the same West Oakland neighborhoods that boast industrial diesel pollution from the bustling port and shockingly high poverty rates, urban food activism has flourished.

City Slicker Farms in West Oakland has a sliding-scale farmers market, a backyard-garden program, and sells vegetable starts as well.Bonnie Powell

“We’re trying to grow as much food as possible for the community,” said City Slicker Executive Director Barbara Finnin.

Started in 2001, City Slicker Farms is one of the oldest food and farming organizations in Oakland. Founded by activist Willow Rosenthal, the group, along with the food justice nonprofit People’s Grocery, has become an incubator and hub for agtivists who want to make fresh, healthy food available to all Oaklanders, especially those low-income communities and communities of color who typically have reduced access to quality produce at affordable prices.

Nonprofits like City Slicker and People’s Grocery have been around for nearly a decade. The city of Oakland is nationally known in sustainable foodie circles as a locus for activism on urban farming and food justice. But the city’s grassroots food and agriculture movement faces a challenge in scaling up that will require significant investment and public sector support.

In January 2006, when Jerry Brown was mayor, the Oakland City Council commissioned a study to examine what it would take to produce 30 percent of the city’s food locally. Two University of California, Berkeley doctoral students completed the work and recommended that Oakland create a Food Policy Council to advise the city on how it could meet that goal.

One mayor and nearly four years later, the Oakland Food Policy Council has a structure and regular meetings, but progress on policy change is slow, and with budget cuts roiling the city, forcing it to take unprecedented measures like laying off 10 percent of its police force, it’s unclear if Oakland will have the foresight, or the dollars, to prioritize citywide changes in food policy.

In some ways, the absence of policy has been an encouragement to urban food production, says Novella Carpenter, West Oakland urban farmer and Farm City author (see Grist’s interview). Carpenter says Oakland’s lack of regulation against raising animals encouraged her to raise a variety of livestock, from honeybees to hogs.

“A lot of cities, for instance, have laws against even having chickens,” she points out. But Oakland has no such law, and hasn’t made it a priority to enforce the few livestock regulations it does have.

“There’s no officer that’s patrolling looking for roosters or male goats [both illegal],” she added. “As long as your neighbors are cool with you having pigs it’s fine.”

Sometimes the neighbors aren’t just “cool with” pigs, they even let you harvest their backyard fruit. That’s the premise behind Forage Oakland, an art project/food bartering network that lets those seeking fruit connect with those who have too much. The project’s goal is not just to keep excess fruit from going to waste, but also to strengthen neighborhood ties by getting neighbors who otherwise wouldn’t interact to connect via fruit.

Projects like Forage Oakland seem to spring up all over Oakland’s funky, fertile activist soil. There’s Planting Justice and Phat Beets Produce (see spotlights below), and Oakland Food Connection, a group that builds school gardens and works with communities and youth to grow food in East Oakland.

A number of these new groups are run by people who first connected with food justice in Oakland via People’s Grocery, an organization that has helped redefine food justice by vigorously educating those who work with it about the systemic causes behind lack of access to fresh and healthy food in low-income communities.

Jason Harvey, the executive director of Oakland Food Connection, which expands the food justice movement into Oakland’s eastern neighborhoods, said the time he spent working as a farmers market manager at People’s Grocery educated him on the disparity between income levels and access to healthy food in Oakland.

In East Oakland, for instance, there is only one grocery store (and 32 liquor stores) for a population of over 30,000, whereas in Oakland’s wealthier Piedmont and Montclair neighborhoods, with a similar number of people, have four supermarkets and half the number of liquor stores.

Five years into his term at Oakland Food Connection, Harvey now talks about combining policy change with the grassroots activist movement he’s long been a part of. Harvey expressed some frustration with the failure of Oakland politicians to imagine alternative futures for the city that might involve, say, cooperative, community-owned grocery stores.

Overall, though, he’s optimistic.

“There’s a number of people right now who are working on trying to create some citywide food justice strategies. I’m one of those people, sitting at the table right now with the executive directors of People’s Grocery and City Slicker Farms,” Harvey said.

Whether Harvey and his cohorts’ strategies to bring systemic change to Oakland’s food system will work remains to be seen. In the meantime, Oakland urban farmers and food justice fighters will keep on growing food, raising livestock, bartering fruit, holding garden work parties and produce exchanges — creatively working to feed themselves and others good, clean, and just food.

Permaculture teacher Gavin Raders and community activist Haleh Zandi decided to turn their successful garden installation business into a permaculture-focused food justice nonprofit. Planting Justice uses its for-profit permaculture installation program — called Transform Your Yard — to fund its mission of bringing healthy food to low-income Oakland residents. For every four gardens Raders and Zandi install with their business, they can install one for free in a low-income household. They also run a community garden in a large North Oakland apartment complex, teach free classes on growing plants and permaculture on their rooftop garden, and support an “edible forest” community garden effort in East Oakland.

Created by Novella Carpenter and her farmer friends in May 2009, the Biofuel Oasis is much more than a renewable energy pit stop — it’s an urban farm store and hub where aspiring farmers can learn how to raise food in the city.

The affordable classes and equipment it offers include recycling gray water for irrigation, raising and butchering rabbits, keeping bees and goats, and preserving the fruits of his or her labor. You can get your organic chicken feed and beekeeping equipment there, too.

Executive Director Max Cadji, who also works for People’s Grocery, started this youth-focused food justice nonprofit with a guerilla produce farmers market selling affordable foods in an Oakland park in 2007. Phat Beets now hosts two farmers markets where producers sell their goods at affordable prices to North Oakland residents. It recently collaborated with the Oakland’s Children’s Hospital and Research Center, where the farmers markets are hosted, to start an obesity prevention garden in a small North Oakland neighborhood. And beginning in June, Phat Beets is operating the Healthy Hearts Youth Market Garden, along with community members of the Dover neighborhood and park, and the patients of the Healthy Hearts Clinic at Children’s Hospital.

California dairy farmer Joey Rocha. Photo: Stephanie OgburnTurlock, Calif. — Joey Rocha tends 2,800 cows at his Central Valley dairy. That may sound like a large herd, but in California, Rocha is a mid-sized dairy producer.

Taken together, California’s dairy cows produce more than 100,000 tons of manure every day. Rocha and his fellow dairy farmers put all those cow pies to good use — as fertilizer for the fields that grow the corn that feeds their herds. It’s a perfect closed-loop system, except for one big problem: nitrogen.

Manure is nitrogen rich, which makes it a great fertilizer. But by applying every last bit of ma­nure to their fields, California dairy farmers — and non-dairy farmers as well — are dosing their crops with more nitrogen than the plants can absorb. The excess nitrogen is causing serious air and water pollution problems and may even be threatening the health of the soil.

There are ways around this problem: dairy producers and farmers could dial back on the manure and synthetic fertilizers they apply. But there’s not a lot of incentive to do this.

“[Fertilizers] are, in fact, relatively cheap and very good insurance,” says Allen Dusault, program director at Sustainable Conservation, a California group that works with farmers to develop economically-feasible approaches to environmental practices. “If you’re a farmer that is applying adequate amounts and then some, it’s good insurance to make sure you get your yields.”

Perverse incentives

Yields are the driving force of modern agriculture. Whether a farmer is growing corn to feed his dairy cows or someone else’s, he gets paid by the ton. If he can apply a little extra of something that is cheap or free (fertilizer or manure) in order to ensure a high yield, that’s a no-brainer.

Although most agronomists will tell you that farmers over apply nitrogen and can get the same yields without adding as much fertilizer and manure as they do, few farmers are willing to take that risk for an environmental benefit that doesn’t impact them.

Thus, nitrogen pollution from farms is really a kind of market failure: individual farmers have little or no incentive to act in a way that protects the groundwater beneath them. But the public does have an interest in clean water; and public action will likely be required to change the incentive structure.

Reducing risk

Allen Dusault, program director at Sustainable Conservation, a California group that works with farmers to develop economically-feasible approaches to improving environmental practices, has thought a lot about the N problem. What’s needed, he says, “is a way to insure the financial viability of crop production methods without creating such a surplus of nitrogen that you have runoff.”

That’s where risk-reduction programs such as the Best Management Practices (BMP) Challenge come in. The BMP Challenge, a unique program available in 18 major farming states, allows farmers to try environmentally-beneficial management techniques by offering to pay them for any costs they might incur in the process.

The program, originally started by American Farmland Trust and now run by a company called AgFlex, is focused mostly in areas where nitrogen runoff is causing big problems: the Chesapeake Bay, Mississippi River watershed, the Great Lakes Region, and now California dairies.

Farmers who enroll in California’s BMP Challenge agree to apply less manure to their corn, and to try and target that application at times when the corn will actually absorb most of the nitrogen in the manure. If farmers’ yields dip, the program compensates them for their loss. If their yields increase or hold steady, farmers pocket the savings from reduced fertilizer use and higher yields.

Rocha was one of the five dairy farmers that Dusault and Sustainable Conservation first approached in 2009 about taking the BMP Challenge. “We don’t look for these new programs,” says Rocha, whose environmental consultant turned him on to the program. “But when stuff comes our way, we do take a listen to it.”

Next year Sustainable Conservation hopes to enroll about 20 dairy producers in the San Joaquin Valley, according to senior project manager Ladi Asgill. The program is appealing, says Asgill, because it “offers an opportunity for dairies to experiment and work out the kinks in implementing a new practice, where we offer risk coverage, basically.”

Speaking of risk, Rocha did have slightly lower yields this year. But he also learned a lot about how to time his irrigations and apply manure more efficiently. With a few years practice, Rocha believes he could get to the point where he sees “the same [yields] with less [manure].”

Limiting risk is a key component in getting farmers to try new practices that have favorable environmental results, says Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition[4], a D.C.-based policy group.

“There really is a barrier to adoption of practices, even practices that on average are great net-return kinds of practices for farmers,” Hoefner says. “They fear there will be some kind of cost of production.”

The BMP Challenge gets farmers over the financial hurdle. For Rocha, it was a “no-fear” option.

“There’s nothing unattractive about it,” he says.

Taking it national

Of course, paying farmers to try new practices can get expensive. Farm conditions vary and the program has to pony up to pay for yield reductions. Ideally, says policy analyst Hoefner, the program might work well as a kind of national insurance policy for farmers willing to try something new.

In Hoefner’s view, modest programs like the BMP Challenge could have a lot of short-term impact. But when it comes to creating truly sustainable agriculture systems, Hoefner says his organization would like to see more support for widespread systemic changes in how dairy farms, and other farming systems, operate. Such changes would include returning to traditional pasture-based grazing systems, and exchanging concentrated animal feeding operations such as Rocha’s for smaller livestock production approaches that integrate animals into farming systems with techniques such as rotational grazing.

The HDTV Challenge

Rocha didn’t get his usual yields last year, but he’s game to try the BMP Challenge or some other similar program again.

“If it’s out there next year, if there’s another program to be had, we’ll take a good hard look at it again,” he says. “If we wind up with … [a] little less nitrogen, that’s better for us, better for the ground.”

In the long run, what matters most is the effect that Rocha’s experiment has on his dairy farming neighbors. If they see him getting more yield with less manure, they may start doing what he’s doing — and if that happens, the practice of smart nitrogen use could snowball.

Sustainable Conservation’s Dusault calls programs like BMP Challenge “showcasing,” and likens Rocha to the early adopters who bought the first HDTVs. (25 percent of American households had high definition televisions in 2007; 50 percent had them in 2009.)

Manure management isn’t as much fun as watching Peyton Manning launch a Hail Mary in hi-def, though, and if California dairies follow the same trend as California farmers who failed to adopt conservation tillage, Dusault’s HDTV penetration model may not apply.

The truth is it’s too early to tell how effective the BMP Challenge for California’s dairies will be. What is clear is that unless government steps in to share some risk or change financial incentives, farmers across the country will likely continue overdosing their fields with nitrogen — to the detriment of our ecosystems and our health.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2010-02-18-to-reduce-nitrogen-pollution-well-need-a-new-set-of-farm-policie/feed/0joey_rocha_400.jpgThe dark side of nitrogenhttp://grist.org/article/2009-11-11-the-dark-side-of-nitrogen/
Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:00:33 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-11-11-the-dark-side-of-nitrogen/]]>Few people spare a thought for nitrogen. But with every bite we take — of an apple, a chicken leg, a leaf of spinach — we are consuming nitrogen. Plants, including food crops, can’t thrive without a ready supply of available nitrogen in the soil.

The amount of food a farmer could grow was once limited by his or her ability to supplement soil nitrogen, either by planting cover crops, applying manure, or moving on to a new, more fertile field. Then, about 100 years ago, a technical innovation enabled us to produce a cheap synthetic form of nitrogen, and voila! Agriculture’s nitrogen limitation problem was solved. The age of industrial nitrogen fertilizers had begun.

The breakthrough, by German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch (rhymes with posh), made it possible to grow many, many, many more crops per acre. For the last 50 years, farmers around the world have used synthetic nitrogen fertilizers to boost their crop yields and drive the 20th century’s rapid agricultural intensification.

But in their fervor to increase yields, farmers often dose their crops with more nitrogen than the plants can absorb. The excess is now causing serious air and water pollution and threatening human health. Ironically, all that fertilizer may even be ruining the very soil it was meant to enrich.

Nitrogen, it seems, has a dark side, and it has created serious problems that we are only now beginning to reckon with.

Nitrogen kills a bay

To see nitrogen’s ill effects up close head to the mid-Atlantic coast and visit the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary. Once the site of a highly productive fishery and renowned for its oysters, crabs, and clams, today the bay is most famous for its ecological ruin.

On Dec. 9, 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency’s restoration program for the Chesapeake Bay marked its 25th anniversary. Other than the passing of the years, there wasn’t much to celebrate. The Chesapeake Bay Program’s goal is rehabilitation of the vastly polluted estuary, yet its 2008 “Bay Barometer” assessment found that “despite small successes in certain parts of the ecosystem and specific geographic areas, the overall health of the Chesapeake Bay did not improve in 2008.” (The fight to save the Chesapeake continues; in 2009, President Obama ordered the federal EPA to lead the ongoing cleanup efforts, but groups involved are still arguing over the details.)

A significant portion of the Chesapeake Bay pollution comes from agricultural operations whose nutrient-rich runoff — in the form of excess nitrogen and phosphorus — fills the Bay’s waters, leading to algal blooms, fish kills, habitat degradation, and bacteria proliferations that endanger human health.

The nitrogen runoff comes from the synthetic fertilizer applied to farm fields, as well as the manure generated from the intensive chicken farming on the east bay. Of course, the nitrogen in that chicken manure — some 650 million pounds per year, according to The New York Times — can largely be traced to synthetic nitrogen; the chickens are merely recycling the synthetic fertilizer that was originally applied to feed crops.

This type of reactive nutrient pollution is now so common that the dead zones, acidified lakes, and major habitat degradation it can cause are occurring with greater frequency, not just in the Chesapeake Bay, but in other parts of the United States and around the world.

Bombs away: Synthetic nitrogen comes of age

Nitrogen is ubiquitous. It makes up 78 percent of the earth’s atmosphere. But atmospheric nitrogen is inert. It exists in a stable, gaseous form (N2), which plants cannot use. Unless nitrogen is made available to plants, either by nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil or by the application of fertilizer, crops won’t grow as productively.

The German chemists Haber and Bosch found a way around this availability problem. Originally conceived as a way to make explosives for war, their technique turned inert nitrogen gas into highly reactive ammonia (NH3), a form of nitrogen that can be applied to soil and absorbed by plants. With their discovery, nitrogen ceased to be a limiting factor in agriculture.

The widespread use of synthetic fertilizer took off after World War II when innovations allowed nitrogen fertilizer to be produced inexpensively and on a grand scale. When Norman Borlaug, a leader of the Green Revolution, and other plant breeders began developing and exporting dwarf, high-yielding, fertilizer-loving varieties of corn and wheat, the new chemical fertilizer addiction went global. In 1960, farmers in developed and developing countries applied about 10 million metric tons of nitrogen fertilizer to their fields. In 2005, they applied 100 million metric tons.

This order of magnitude increase coincided with the Green Revolution. Indeed, nitrogen fertilizer is largely responsible for the phenomenal crop yield increases of the past 45 years. Without the additional food production fueled by nitrogen fertilizer, researchers estimate that two billion fewer people would be alive today.

Shifting shapes, getting around

Modern agriculture — and, consequently, present-day human society — depends on the widespread availability of cheap nitrogen fertilizer, the ingredient that makes our high-yielding food system possible. But the industrialization of this synthetic nitrogen fertilizer has come with costs.

The high temperatures and very high pressures needed to transform N2 to NH3 are energy intensive. About one percent of the world’s annual energy consumption is used to produce ammonia, most of which becomes nitrogen fertilizer. That’s about 80 million metric tons (or roughly one percent) of annual global CO2 emissions — a significant carbon footprint.

Nearly half that fertilizer is used to grow feed for livestock. Herds then return the nitrogen to the landscape, where it contributes to several different kinds of pollution — the second cost of synthetic nitrogen.

Synthetic fertilizer is made with reactive nitrogen — that’s what makes the fertilizer easy for plants to use. As it turns out, though, reactive nitrogen doesn’t always stay where you put it. Farmers may apply this synthetic fertilizer to their cornfields, but the nitrogen in it will happily engage with the soil carbon, oxygen, and water in its environment. This is the essential problem with reactive nitrogen — its ability to morph and move around, often to unhealthy ends (see illustration).

Estimates vary on just how much nitrogen escapes from fields and remains reactive and potentially harmful, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that plants absorb 30 to 50 percent of the nitrogen in the soil. So if a farmer applies 125 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer to an acre of corn, 30-50 percent of it will end up in the corn; as much as 70 percent — or 87 pounds per acre — could end up somewhere else.

‘N’ stands for ‘Needs to improve’

There is an obvious way around this nitrogen problem: use less fertilizer more efficiently. But there’s not much incentive to cut back.

Farmers get paid by the ton, which makes yields the driving force of modern agriculture. Most agronomists agree that farmers can get the same yields without applying as much fertilizer and manure as they now do. But few farmers are willing to take that chance. Many farmers use fertilizer as a form of insurance; better to apply a little too much and get high yields than apply too little and risk yield (and profit) declines.

The challenge then is to find a way to provide plants with enough nutrients to maintain high yields while also minimizing nitrogen leakages. This may sound straightforward, but it’s tough to find mainstream farmers who are using nitrogen efficiently and safely. There simply aren’t incentives to do so. Fertilizer is cheap, and polluters don’t pay.

The situation might change if nitrous oxide becomes regulated under climate legislation. But in the climate bills currently making their way through Congress, agricultural emissions are explicitly exempted from any cap. Even if ag-related nitrous oxide emissions did get capped, policies would have to address efficiency directly. Otherwise, a climate-focused policy risks encouraging farmers to adopt practices that simply force the reactive nitrogen in another direction — into ground and surface water, for example.

Farmers don’t over-apply nitrogen on purpose. Nor do they want to contribute to estuary pollution and dead zones. But for 40 years, we’ve invested in a type of agriculture that rewards high yields over all other considerations.

U.S. grain farmers operate under pressure to generate volume, and have little or no incentive to conserve synthetic nitrogen along the way. Under the Farm Bill, commodity farmers get subsidies based on how many bushels they churn out, not how efficiently they use nitrogen. Even when fertilizer prices spiked in 2008, synthetic nitrogen remained a remarkably cheap resource — and corn farmers had every economic reason to lay it on liberally.

In their 2009 paper in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, researchers G. Philip Robertson from the University of Michigan and Peter M. Vitousek from Stanford noted that the cost of applying a little additional nitrogen to a cornfield is more than paid for by the marginal gains in yield. In other words, corn is really cheap — but nitrogen is even cheaper.

Scientists now know that this arrangement can’t last forever — agricultural intensification has come with enormous costs. They also know there are other ways to manage crops and reward farmers. The Rodale Institute’s research on high yield production using cover crops to build soil organic matter and biologically fix nitrogen provides one example of a potential alternative to current practices. But the incentive structure around farming must change.

No longer can farm-support policy blindly push maximum yield. Farmers should be rewarded at least as much for conserving nitrogen and building the organic matter in soil. Rodale’s research suggests that those goals can be achieved without sacrificing much in the way of long-term yield.

Twenty-five years ago, the Commonwealths of Pennsylvania and Virginia, the state of Maryland, and the District of Columbia formally agreed to cooperate with the United States Environmental Protection Agency, in order “to fully address the extent, complexity, and sources of pollutants entering the [Chesapeake] Bay.” As it turns out, the Bay and other nitrogen-threatened ecosystems need more than cooperation to get healthy. They need the kind of political will that will take nitrogen efficiency and impacts seriously — and force actual changes to agricultural practices. And endangered ecosystems need for those changes to happen soon. We don’t have another quarter century to spare.

“The locavore approach to reforming our broken food system has serious limits-limits that our exuberant acceptance of eating local has obscured,” McWilliams writes. In their application of a simplistic valuing methodology (judging food purely by how far away from one’s plate it originated), he claims, these 100-mile dieters could potentially do more harm than good, if they succeeded in their apparent mission to force the entire world’s eaters to choose food grown within a short drive of their kitchen table.

The problem with this argument is its irrelevance. The few truly orthodox locavores who presumably exist (do you know even one?) aren’t close to persuading the world to eat the way they do. To devote an entire book to debunking the impulse to eat closer to home doesn’t address the points raised by food and farm activists. At their most relevant, today’s alternative eaters illuminate the systemic problems created by industrialized food provisioning: negative impacts on the global climate as well as significant deterioration in water quality, soil quality, local economies, worker justice, and human health.

McWilliams reduces the message of the food movement to a simple prescription–eat local–and proceeds to debunk it. Yet it’s hard to believe any thoughtful person could imagine that eating locally would address this multitude of issues. One imagines, rather, that consumers, when faced with a system they don’t support, are voting with their dollars for the only alternatives they can find-local food at the farmers market and organic products at the store. What McWilliams seems to miss is that these purchasing choices don’t make people fundamentalist locavores or organic purists. The locavores I know don’t view shopping consciously as a solution; they view it as a protest.

The author often categorizes proponents of alternative food systems–first locavores, then organic advocates, then those who object to genetically modified crops–as wild-eyed extremists in need of some firm schooling on “a golden mean of producing food.” McWilliams’ vision of this agricultural golden mean promotes lifecycle assessments over food miles, and judicious pesticide use over organics. He preaches the potential of genetically modified cassava to feed starving Africans, dismisses grass-fed beef because it can’t be scaled up to meet current demand, and advocates a drastic increase in freshwater aquaculture to meet demands for animal protein.

Again and again, one gets the uncomfortable feeling that McWilliams creates fanatical straw men in order to make his own presentation of facts seem like a rational alternative. “The problems that I have with organic agriculture have less to do with how it is currently practiced than with the inflated claim that it’s the only alternative to today’s wasteful conventional production,” he writes. But do any serious proponents seeking more sustainable alternatives to conventional agriculture claim this?

As he continues on his mission to disabuse the ecological faithful of their trust in growing organically, McWilliams uses the fact that sometimes organic growers use toxic natural compounds to knock organic off what he perceives to be its high horse of purity, and then cites the work of Bruce Ames, a controversial Berkeley scientist, to support the view that many modern pesticides don’t hold the same risks as their older counterparts. Despite devoting pages to each of these points, they do little to move McWilliams towards his chapter’s supposed conclusion: that organic should fall within a “continuum of farming systems.” A discussion of the pros and cons of organic and conventional production, and a studied evaluation of other farming systems along such a continuum, would have been a good start.

McWilliams’ defense of modern pesticides leads him to a contradiction. If pesticides aren’t so bad, one wonders why the author’s measured support for GMO crops hinges in part with the argument that they allow for a reduction in pesticide use. Or do they? “To be sure, there are many studies that show the exact opposite-that is, that GM crops have done nothing to reduce pesticide use,” McWilliams writes.

Paying little heed to such inconvenient tangles in this chapter or others, McWilliams hurtles forward down the path of measured (the man loves his middle ground) support for GM crops. In his rush to the middle, though, the author misses some important facets of the GM debate. For example, he glosses over evidence that GM technology hasn’t managed to boost yields, much industry hype to the contrary; and he ignores the vested interest in today’s crop of herbicide-tolerant genetically modified seeds: namely, that the companies that sell seeds with herbicide resistance also peddle the herbicides that must accompany their product.

This blithe obliviousness to the profit-seeking motives of the GM seed industry allows McWillams to argue for development of GM technology for “subsistence oriented” crops so they might thrive in dry or salty soils. This argument falls short on economic and theoretical grounds. While Monsanto can make billions of dollars per year selling Roundup Ready corn and soy (and Roundup) to industrial-scale farmers, there’s little cash to be made selling, say, drought-tolerant cassava to African smallholders. So what entity is going to develop such seeds? McWilliams’ answer: the Gates Foundation. But while the aims of the foundation are admirable, there’s plenty of evidence that Gates, like McWilliams, doesn’t really understand hunger in Africa.

Gates and McWilliams, in promoting biotechnology as the solution to Africa’s food troubles, take a shortsighted view of hunger, seeing it only through the lens of yield shortages and disregarding the ample historical evidence that hunger in developing countries has at least as much to do with world trade, democratic failures, poverty, and conflict as they do with the lack of a salt-tolerant sorghum seed.

McWilliams: courageously manning the middle of the road. The most sensible recommendation McWilliams makes is that if we want to lesson agriculture’s impact on natural systems, we need to eat less meat. In forming this argument, he relies heavily on a 2006 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization, almost to the point where one felt reading the report and getting data firsthand might have been a better use of time. McWilliams’ also hypes the importance of life-cycle analyses (LCAs) in pointing out inefficiencies in the food system. LCAs are good tools, but they hardly represent the sort of radical approach that’s “off the public radar screen,” as the author claims, ignored by locavores the world over as they persist in stubbornly clinging to food miles as their shortcut solution for determining a food’s ecological footprint.

McWilliams’ stated goal in writing Just Food was to lay a blueprint for “how we can truly eat responsibly.” He’s right in pointing out that eating locally and organically alone won’t result in the creation of a just food system, and that there’s much work left to do if the aim is sustainability in food provisioning. Yet his book fails to outline any sort of considered analysis of what a “truly” responsible food system might look like. Instead, the author wastes time promoting himself as the arbiter of rational thinking about the food system, an antidote to those rabid locavores and organic purists crowding the aisles of Whole Foods and farmers markets who vainly believe they’ve found the solution to our food systems’ problems.

One imagines McWilliams, a historian at Texas State University, might have written a book more in tune with his academic training, perhaps an examination of the rise of the varied movements of local eating, organic growing, fair trade, and healthy food access. He could have combined this historical survey with an analysis of what these movements mean in the greater context of our increasingly globalizing food system, and concluded with how they might be woven together into a forward-thinking approach that moves us toward the “just food” he claims to care so much about. Instead, we’re left with a treatise that focuses more on taking Alice Waters and Slow Food advocates down a peg than on putting forth innovative solutions to the problems within our food system. While this might be the author’s idea of fun, it’s ultimately a childish way to make a point, and a disappointing strategy on which to hinge a book.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-09-08-mcwilliams-locavore-polemic/feed/1Ogburn_justfood_image.jpggrass fedmcwilliamsAn interview with the innovators behind ioby.orghttp://grist.org/article/2009-05-28-interview-ioby/
http://grist.org/article/2009-05-28-interview-ioby/#commentsFri, 29 May 2009 02:17:03 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-05-28-interview-ioby/]]>We’ve all heard that eating locally is one way to reduce your environmental impact. But what about donating locally? In the urban wilds of New York City, a new non-profit is betting that locally based, small-scale giving can have a big eco-impact.

Ioby, whose name stands for “in our back yards,” connects people working on neighborhood-level projects with community members who can physically and financially support them. At ioby.org, launched this month by co-founders Erin Barnes, Cassie Flynn, and Brandon Whitney, individuals or groups post project descriptions and budgets, and interested donors contribute to the project of their choice. Here’s their introductory video:

Within its first 10 days of existence, ioby successfully facilitated the funding of the first three of its 40 listed projects: a Boy Scout proposed and executed an environmental awareness fair, a community garden got a compost education class off the ground, and another grassroots group undertook a park cleanup and revegetation project in Queens. It’s all part of an effort, says Barnes, to get people connected to their surroundings and invested in the future.

The concept that powers the organization’s work is known as microfinance. As a philanthropy model, it’s not new, but in recent years it’s gained momentum online, with popular sites focusing on education and international development projects. Ioby is the first microfinance site to focus on funding local environmental projects.

Fueled by their successes so far, ioby’s founders — who met at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and have called New York City home since graduating in 2007 — hope to expand the model to other communities around the country, though they acknowledge that it will take a lot more work than they first realized. They recently got together to answer a few questions about where the idea came from, who’s using ioby.org, and how it works.

Organizers of “It’s My Park!” day asked ioby followers to help them raise awareness.ioby.orgQ.Do you think ioby’s small-scale model is the future of environmental activism?

A.Barnes: A lot of environmental work comes from national campaigns, and all of those efforts are really important. But I think one of the things that we miss is the groups themselves in the neighborhoods, recognizing their own environmental problems, proposing their own solutions. Ioby helps small, community-based groups like neighborhood associations and block associations. It gives them a website, it gives them a storefront, it gives them a cash register, a place where they can talk about these issues to the general public.I actually think that this is a pretty powerful tool for grassroots organizing. You can reach a lot of people – that’s what social networking does. You engage them by telling them the stories about projects that are happening in their own neighborhoods. You ask them for $20 or three hours on a Saturday afternoon. And I think at that point you have a dedicated lifelong member who wants to make sure that half a block of green space is protected into the future.Flynn: The people that go onto ioby.org, they get to see what’s going on in their neighborhood and they get to choose a project that is meaningful to them.Whitney: Ioby really is about local places and helping people either rediscover or discover for the first time that the environment isn’t something that’s abstract or far away, and that it’s mostly about what’s right around you.

Q.How do people get projects on ioby?

A.Whitney: You go to ioby.org. It’s very easy to find the application there. You create a login first, and it’s a pretty short series of questions. It’s not a very onerous process, we don’t think. We take about two weeks to review [the project] and make sure it meets all of our criteria, and then we get back to you with our answer and we post it. We have worked with groups to make an initial idea that didn’t completely meet our criteria, or had a huge budget, into something better suited for our site.

To help residents explore the undiscovered trails of northern Manhattan, Hike the Heights sought funds and volunteers.ioby.orgQ.What kind of projects are you most excited about?

A.Barnes: There’s so many. The Rockaway Waterfront Alliance is a good one. It’s a rainwater harvest system that they want to install, and that’s actually just $345. It’s about storm water management, reducing non-point source pollution from flooding. The All People’s Garden on the Lower East Side needs $2,000 to remove some serious concrete debris. There’s a CUNY-Baruch honors student who is proposing to build a green roof on his school’s building. Groups are composting at McCarren Park in Brooklyn, gardening in abandoned lots, boating in the East River, and hiking through Northern Manhattan. There’s just so many projects on the site I can’t keep track of them.

Q.Who’s using ioby so far?

A.Barnes: The project groups that are using ioby are really various. Some of them are 501(c)3s, some of them are not. One group is Columbia University’s public health department, and another is Sustainable South Bronx, and one is a school teacher in Washington Heights. There’s a lot of community gardens, and there are some that just focus on one neighborhood, like Trees Not Trash Bushwick.

Q.How do you ensure a funded project gets completed?

A.Barnes: Our project groups do the fundraising [at ioby.org] and then, as the project is underway, they post updates. They post photos and they talk about when volunteers come out and plant some trees and clean up some debris … At the end, when the project is completed, they submit a report and write about lessons learned, or what they would have done differently, or advice to other groups, and they put that on the website [where it’s available to the public].

Q.How did you come up with the idea for ioby?

A.Barnes: We copied already successful models and applied it to the idea of doing local environmental work. A lot of the other wonderful, fantastic, online micro-philanthropies that are hugely, wildly successful are about someone really far away giving money to something that they’re really far away from. We were thinking that with the environment being something that people have a personal connection to, if we encourage people to donate to something locally then they’re investing in the future of their own neighborhoods.

Q.Do you have plans to expand ioby to other cities?

A.Whitney: The short answer is yes. Although we’ve found over the past year that it takes an incredible amount of work to build the capacity to engage with the hundreds of groups that we’ve talked to thus far just in one city. And so it’s going to be a process of expanding city by city, and sort of picking some key places first.

Q.Do you really think small, local environmental projects can make a difference when we face such vast environmental problems?

One teacher is seeking support so students can test soil and water quality.ioby.orgA.Barnes: You’re talking about New York City. You’re talking about a city with the carbon footprint of Ireland. You’re talking about this massive place where if all these people make a small individual effort it can make a huge, huge impact. All you have to do is get one eighth of all of New York City residents to help plant a tree each and then you have a million trees.Flynn: I think one of the things that ioby really believes in is that a lot of small actions can lead to big change. We hear a lot about these huge environmental problems. “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, and a lot of people learned there’s this big problem going on out there. Now that we have this information, what’s the next step? People want to know how to get involved. And these are people that don’t come necessarily from an environmental background. They want to learn more, and they want to get involved, and they can go to ioby and they can do these smaller projects that do add up to big change.

Q.It sounds as if you’re equating environmentalism with community building.

A.Flynn: Ioby tries to tap into this idea that environmentalism can be what you care about. A lot of people, especially in New York, are very connected to their space. We’re very proud of our borough … And I think ioby is providing this space where you see all the great things that are going on around you in a place that you really care about.Barnes: I think that environmentalism has always been about the things that are immediately around you. It’s the streets and sidewalks we walk on every single day, it’s the subway we take to work, and it’s that poor little tree that’s barely able to sprout out of the sidewalk. It’s hotdog stands and soccer fields. That’s our environment. If you clean it up, and you put your blood and sweat into that, and you plant some trees, you are going to become a steward of that for the rest of your life. This is about transformational environmentalism, where we become environmentalists for life.

Editor’s note: Stephanie Paige Ogburn attended graduate school at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies along with the three founders of ioby.org. She is not involved in ioby.org in any way other than writing about it as a new model of environmental activism.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-05-28-interview-ioby/feed/1ioby.smiles.jpgpainting canshike the heightswater studentsA multicolored good food movementhttp://grist.org/article/2009-04-23-multi-food-movement/
http://grist.org/article/2009-04-23-multi-food-movement/#respondThu, 23 Apr 2009 00:19:43 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-23-multi-food-movement/]]>Photo courtesy of M J M, via FlickrAs the good food movement matures, its members have begun discussing its inclusiveness. This week, at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s ninth Food and Society Conference, speaker after speaker touched upon the topic of race and access to good food.

“Who is at the table?” asked Anim Steel, Director of National Programs for The Food Project, a Boston-based organization that works to engage youth in sustainable agriculture. Steel’s rhetorical question referred to a growing conversation among members of the sustainable food movement about helping the movement grow and include all people, not just those who can afford organic food.

This conversation’s incredibly important. It could also be awkward and uncomfortable, as it broaches the historically difficult topics of structural racism and environmental justice. “Nutritional redlining” was one of the phrases uttered in a conference speech by Erika Allen, who works with her father Will Allen doing the awe-inspiring work of Milwaukee-based food and farm organization Growing Power. Erika Allen’s speech also addressed the thorny topic of how food movement members can create healthy food systems in tandem with low-income communities, as opposed to imposing these food systems from the outside, without community buy-in and input. Of course, this issue isn’t limited to food systems building; low-income communities and communities of color have long suffered disproportionately negative impacts from externally-imposed urban planning and economic development decisions.

All of this talk of white privilege and power in the food system may sound like a circular return to past debates of environmental justice and the problems of an overly-white environmental movement, but in fact, the willingness of a relatively nascent coalition of good food and farming activists to listen and participate in a difficult conversation on race and privilege points to the movement’s growing power and maturity.

Everyone eats. Unhealthy food, grown in unsustainable ways, negatively impacts all the world’s people, and disproportionately impacts poor communities and communities of color. As minority populations in the U.S. grow in voice and number, and the alternative food movement’s willingness and ability to provide a welcome “place at the table” to all eaters, is not only logistically necessary, but morally imperative.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-04-23-multi-food-movement/feed/0rainbow_chard.jpgBig ag, little ag, and government supporthttp://grist.org/article/dispatches-from-the-fields-your-tax-dollars-at-work/
Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:51:48 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=26109]]>In “Dispatches from the Fields,” Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America’s agro-industrial landscape.

—–

In the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to attend a couple of events here in southwestern Colorado sponsored by the state and federal governmental agriculture agencies. Taxpayer-funded ag technicians showed off impressive new methods of irrigation and water management. They also demonstrated their commitment to the standard ag paradigm: maximizing yield of industrial inputs — e.g., crops that produce seeds that can be crushed into vegetable oil — above all other considerations.

At the same time, however, I came away encouraged. For while these public servants clearly focus on supporting industrial-scale farming, they also showed a refreshing openness to working with small-scale farmers who produce food for their neighbors to eat.

The first was a oilseed crop field day at the Colorado State University Extension experimental station, and the second was an open house sponsored by the Natural Resources Conservation Service branch of the United States Department of Agriculture.

At the field day, I rode around in a wagon pulled by a large John Deere tractor as extension agents showed off field trials of oilseed crops — primarily sunflowers, safflowers, and canola. See, we’ve got a brand-new oilseed processing facility, San Juan Bioenergy, going online in the nearby town of Dove Creek, Colo., this November, and for the past four years the experimental station has been supporting area farmers in their efforts to transition to these unfamiliar crops. (Previously, these farmers had primarily grown dry beans and wheat.)

This year, the station experimented with both irrigated and dryland (non-irrigated) sunflower crops, and found that targeted irrigation at a certain sunflower growth stage can increase yields while using less water than constant irrigation throughout the growth cycle of the sunflowers.

This is an important finding from an environmental perspective, and some of the research station’s other experiments also offer other promising results that could work toward improving the environmental impact of these crops. For instance, the research station experimented with different varieties of sunflowers to determine the best oil seed yields for non-irrigated versus irrigated land. They even conducted water table measurements this year to determine the frequency with which to rotate sunflowers, which typically deplete the water table in dryland fields, with other crops whose roots don’t go as deep and can rely more on surface water.

Of course, the research station also conducts trials with Roundup Ready canola, a genetically modified crop dependent on the spraying of the herbicide Roundup. It’s testing out the canola as a potential biodiesel feedstock source. (Although San Juan Bioenergy is focusing on sunflower and safflower food oil production at the moment, it hopes to produce biodiesel as well.) The research station also uses its experimental plantings to test which herbicides and pesticides work best on weeds and sunflower insect pests. To my knowledge, it offers very little in the way of support for growing organic sunflowers and safflowers, although there is a demand for organic sunflower and safflower oil for use in organic products.

Taken as a whole, the research station’s work does not have a focus on improving overall environmental quality — increasing yields remain the golden goal in terms of research, and agents and scientists are still entrenched in a relatively narrow agricultural paradigm.

This narrowness of scope also seemed apparent at the Natural Resource Conservation ServiceFarm Bill Implementation meeting I attended last week, where federal employees were clearly unprepared to deal with the group of small scale farmers and ranchers who showed up at the meeting; they had come expecting to talk about water and soil issues that are caused by large-scale ranching operations. These federal employees are ready with the tools to help you conserve water if you’re growing hundreds of acres of hay, but if you’re growing intensively on six acres and want federal engineering consultation, and, what the heck, maybe even federal cost sharing support on your irrigation system (they offer it to the big farmers here all the time, in the form of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program), these agents didn’t have much to offer.

Although most of this isn’t news — the federal government and extension agents have rarely, in recent history, been supporters of the environmentally-conscious family farm — what is new was their recognition of this fact, and their expressed willingness to possibly work with small farmers in the future. At the NRCS meeting, agents there specifically acknowledged that they had not come prepared to work with the smaller scale farmers and ranchers who attended the meeting, but repeatedly stressed that we should provide input to them so that our needs would be included in the Farm Bill implementation process.

On the extension side of things, growers in certain areas have agitated for, and gotten, organic extension agents who do run trials for them and offer support that runs from ways to combat specific pests with organic methods to information on new market crops that growers might want to invest in growing. These supports are important, and the channels for them already exist. Farmers and citizens ought to communicate with their government agencies and ask for this service — for the most part, those on the grassroots level are ready to listen and are often even sympathetic to organic and environmental concerns.

Michigan State University has an active organic extension operation, as does North Dakota, and North Carolina even has an extension service dedicated to supporting small farms. That’s pretty cool. And I’m sure there are many other state university extension programs supporting organic and smaller agricultural operations in other states that I’m not aware of. In Colorado, I’m only aware of one specifically organic extension agent who works in a predominantly industrial ag-focused office, but his position is, at least, a start.

Currently, the federal government, coupled with state university extensions, spends an enormous amount of money (about $35 billion allocated in this year’s Farm Bill) supporting agriculture. There’s nothing wrong with targeting that support towards sustainable ag and the support of environmentally-friendly practices. So if you’re a farmer, show up at those meetings and express your needs. And if you’re a citizen, ask your local state and federal agriculture agencies what they are doing to support local, sustainable agriculture — your voice matters.

]]>On the transformative potential of community-scale food productionhttp://grist.org/article/dispatches-from-the-fields-back-to-the-garden/
http://grist.org/article/dispatches-from-the-fields-back-to-the-garden/#respondThu, 11 Sep 2008 05:33:17 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=25532]]>In “Dispatches From the Fields,” Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America’s agro-industrial landscape.

—–

This spring, someone transformed the vacant lot across the street from my in-town apartment here in Cortez, a town of 8,000 in southwest Colorado. Until the transformation, I had never really noticed the parcel of land. It wasn’t an after-hours hangout, was never vandalized, and was thus invisible to me as I ran, biked, or drove by it nearly every day.

That all changed in May, when the piece of ground formerly cloaked with the standard vacant-lot quilt of red clay dirt and desert weeds got plowed. That expanse of newly-turned, fresh red dirt, baring its face to the desert sun, was hard to miss.

At about the same time the plowing occurred, the dead and dying elm trees surrounding the lot were cut down. The place now had full sun, and was transformed not only physically, but also in my imagination. I walked over to the fence separating the field from the street, gazed at the empty field and thought to myself, could this be a future garden?

I sort of doubted that the plower’s intention was to garden the space. People here have lots of heavy machinery, and sometimes they seem to use such machinery for things like plowing a field under just for kicks, or to kill the weeds, or maybe to show their kids how the tiller connects to the riding lawnmower.

But then one day a lone man in jeans appeared, with a truckload of tomato and pepper plants.

In the space of a couple evenings, he placed the plants in the ground. As the weeks passed, a sprinkler appeared, squash sprouted, and rows of sweet corn lined up at the garden’s periphery. I saw the gardener harvesting out there one night, beer can in hand. Since he didn’t seem to be around all that much, plenty of weeds made their home in the space as well. But the cultivated plants survived, and by August I could look out my front window and spy a well-heeled garden just across the street. It was kind of inspiring.

I’ve always enjoyed growing plants, but this year particularly, I’ve noticed the power of a simple garden — to feed, to teach, to inspire, to beautify. And gardens here are growing and thriving, and, importantly, they’re everywhere. This year, as I’ve taken regular runs around the neighborhoods that comprise Cortez, I’ve seen tomatoes plopped amidst front-yard ornaments and smiled at squash plants spilling out onto city sidewalks. Having only lived here a year, I can’t say if the prevalence of front-yard gardens is a growing trend or simply a quirk of small town life, but man, people here are growing food, and it’s exciting.

Why? Because gardens are transformative places. It’s magical to find a dark purple potato deep in the soil. I still get excited every time I pull a fresh, crunchy radish out of the ground just four weeks after planting a pinhead-sized seed. It’s easier to understand what food is and where it comes from after having a garden, and gardens are jump-off points for conversations about the greater world — an interaction between two people about which type of pepper does best here can start a whole dialogue on local foods. Additionally, a gardener can easily look at a product — in the grocery store, or at the farmers market — and recognize it as real food (could I grow, make, or preserve that?), or something else.

In the rural West, gardens seem like an agreeable space for change to occur. Growing your own food fits with the rugged homesteader mentality that persists in many Western minds. Gardening doesn’t have the elitist tinges that many in the “flyover” states associate with the coastal alternative food movement. It’s gritty, down-to-earth, and anyone with access to a bit of land (plentiful here), rudimentary tools, and seeds can start one just about anywhere.

I’m involved with a group of people who want to start a community garden in our town. (For those interested in learning about community gardens, the American Community Gardening Association has a lovely web site.) We’re hoping to get land donated, and are applying for grant money to pay for materials, irrigation, dirt, seeds, etc — all the parts that go into building a garden. I hope it happens. If it does, the culture of food in Montezuma County certainly won’t change overnight — but families and individuals will have a space not only to produce food, but to come together as producers, to learn from Master Gardeners who will volunteer teaching time, and to experience a food chain, from seed to table, right in their hometown.

Although a community garden does not address all the problems with our food system, it has the advantage of being more accessible than a conference but more engaging than a purchase. We already have a gardening culture in Montezuma County, and people here seem to want a community garden. It makes sense to work with what we have, to use our preexisting heritage as a Western town full of do-it-yourselfers with a lot of moxie, but maybe not a lot of money, and start something that might work at the rather slow rate of change that exists in the rural West.

And over the course of a season of planting, weeding, and harvesting crops, a lot of conversations can take place — about food, the environment, what to do with that funny-looking kohlrabi, and, heck, maybe even about how to make the world a better place.

]]>http://grist.org/article/dispatches-from-the-fields-back-to-the-garden/feed/0Udall stumps on renewables and more to a crowded roomhttp://grist.org/article/mark-udall-visits-rural-colorado/
http://grist.org/article/mark-udall-visits-rural-colorado/#respondWed, 03 Sep 2008 02:26:47 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=25369]]>I had the opportunity to attend a campaign event for Mark Udall Friday afternoon, when he stopped by the Montezuma County Democratic headquarters for a short stump speech and Q&A.

Udall is a sitting representative in the House who is running against Republican Bob Schaffer for the Senate seat vacated by Republican Wayne Allard. Udall, a tall, rangy, candidate who sported the requisite Western dress of cowboy boots, denim, and a button-down, only spoke for about 20 minutes, but his understanding of and dedication to Western and national environmental issues quickly shone through.

Udall said he wanted American policies to “trigger a green energy revolution,” and called Colorado the “ground zero” for a reformed energy policy. The state’s been hit hard by the oil and gas boom, and the southwestern part of the Colorado that Udall toured today, which included Dolores, Montezuma, and La Plata counties, is no stranger to the boom-bust drilling cycle and its associated economic and environmental impacts.

During the talk, Udall stated that he supports the “Gang of 16” (formerly the “Gang of 10“) proposal, a compromise piece of legislation that allows select states the option of offshore drilling in exchange for the extension of tax breaks for renewable energy development. The bill would also provide billions of dollars to U.S. automakers to fund development of automobiles that run on non-fossil fuel alternative energy.

Udall’s support of offshore drilling in the Gang of 16 proposal is a politically expedient shift from his earlier, no offshore drilling position. I can give him that — he’s running a campaign, after all, and the proposed legislation leaves the decision to drill or not to drill to the states. The man is clearly committed to renewable energy — sitting about six feet from Udall I could see his animation when he spoke on the topic.

Although I didn’t get to ask a question during the brief Q&A session, I did run up to Udall after the event and ask him about his plans for bringing the renewable energy industry to rural and economically depressed areas like Montezuma County, where we have 300+ days of sun a year, a population in need of mid-level wage jobs, two pollution-belching coal-fired power plants located just across the state line, in New Mexico, and a new one in the works.

Udall’s short but animated answer, as he was herded out the door by an anxious staffer, was that he would put the dollars saved by eliminating oil and gas subsidies into things like the production tax credit and investment tax credit for renewable energy companies that would help jump start these industries. If you go to his website, there’s a pretty comprehensive energy plan outlined, which includes the credits, among other items (including a short bone thrown to nuclear).

I left the short event with two strong impressions: First — people in Montezuma County, a traditionally “red” county in Colorado, are excited to hear from a Democratic candidate. At least 70 people filled the small Democratic HQ, an astonishingly high number for any event around here.

Second — Udall’s ability to speak with common sense about environmental issues will serve him well in a competitive Senate race for the state of Colorado.

“You all know in this part of the world that Mother Nature bats last,” he said during his talk. That kind of statement, a respectful acknowledgment that our lives are built around natural resources, makes sense to Westerners, conservative and liberal alike.

]]>http://grist.org/article/mark-udall-visits-rural-colorado/feed/0Can sustainable farming provide a sustainable living?http://grist.org/article/dispatches-from-the-fields-the-trouble-with-small-scale-farming/
Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:57:55 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=25266]]>In “Dispatches from the Fields,” Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America’s agro-industrial landscape.

—–

Should small-scale farmers who grow organically and sell locally or regionally be able to make a middle-class living with farming as their sole source of income?

I’ve always answered this question with a fervent “yes,” at least from a philosophical perspective. But the answer to the follow-up question — “do they?” — is nearly always a resounding no.

Sure, there are exceptions. In Southwest Colorado, I live in an immature market for small-scale, local food, so farmers here are probably doing worse on the whole due to lack of market penetration. (When you live in a rural area with low population, you can’t just sell to the top 1 or 2 percent of customers — you really have to have a widespread appeal in order to lift sales, since your population base is so much smaller than if you were selling to an urban center. And that depth of customer base takes a long time to build.) So here, out of, say, 25 vegetable farmers I know selling at area markets, only one of them earns a full-time living from her farming occupation.

The reality is, it’s really hard to make a living selling a low-end product that is easily replicable and requires a high quantity of labor, but, comparatively speaking, a low level of skill to produce. And food is a low-end product. Tomatoes at $3/lb, which is what they go for here, are cheap. Like it or not, small farmers locally and across the U.S. are selling a cheap product on a minuscule scale, which, anyway you look at it, is a failing business model.

This is a problem, and the small growers I know have a variety of solutions.

The most common solution I’ve seen to the difficulties of making a living while being a small farmer involves having a second source of income. Farmers work winter jobs, second jobs, and moonlight as writers, web designers, or other time-flexible occupations.

Another way to get by is to sell higher-end products that make the farmer more money per unit of input. My employer, Dragonfly Farms, sells value-added products to rich people in Telluride, Colo. My boss purchases fair-trade organic herbs and teas in bulk, blends the dry ingredients together (sometimes with herbs we grow) to create her own teas and herbal infusions, pours those blends into tins and sells these as loose leaf, one-of-a-kind teas. She also uses those bulk herbs to make a variety of non-food products, like bath teas, eye teas, and lavender dryer sheets. The profit margins on these products are much higher than those on the vegetables we produce with our own backbreaking labor, primarily because the raw materials for the teas and herb products are produced with cheap (albeit fair trade) labor in developing nations.

Other farmers have also jumped on the value-added bandwagon, noting that fruits like apples, tomatoes, and grapes in portable form (sauce, wine) sell for significantly more than the raw material per pound price, and people pay more for items like goat milk when it comes concentrated into a soap.

Still another contingent of farmers have upped production, noting that if you sell a heaping ton of food, even at low prices, you can make some money. This comes at a cost, though — when you raise production to sell, say, 30,000 lbs of food per season at an average price of $3/lb (lettuce sells for slightly more, zucchini for slightly less), you have to have more hands to harvest and wash all that food so it’s ready to sell to restaurants and at your two Saturday markets. Of course, if you have more workers you spend more money on labor, so the people you hire have to be cheap laborers. This is the model followed, at the largest scale, by places like Earthbound Farm.

Organic farming is no different from conventional farming in this way — if farmers make the decision to make money by upping the scale of their production, they must minimize their labor costs so that each additional unit of production is more profitable than if they were just growing what they could produce with their own labor. Notably, “small-scale” vegetable farms that are really making money with this direct-to-customer service are often quite large, and rely significantly on their cheap labor to make their operation possible.

And finally, there are niche producers, those who make products like artisanal cheeses, organic cut flowers, or truffles. Based on my own observations, however, and also according to a recent New York Times article, even those farmers haven’t been able to drop their day jobs.

Farmers who have chosen not to grow larger, like Torrey Reade, who dropped her Wall Street career to work on a farm, often live at the poverty line, in terms of income. Reade, a Harvard Business School graduate, is hardly ignorant of business profitability principals. But she doesn’t seem to be able to make money doing small-scale farming; she instead made a choice stay small and stay poor. The article about her notes that her vegetable sales were crowded out by larger organic operations, and while she still grows vegetables for personal consumption, she turned to beef, lambs, and oats, which now keep her afloat, but barely.

In a world where the dominant economic model is “get big or get out,” small farmers, no matter how diversified or creative they are, don’t have much of a chance to make a full-fledged living growing food. As a farmer, it seems difficult, nearly impossible, to stay rooted in the desire to stay small enough to farm alone or with a partner if you want to make money. Note that small-scale conventional farming is a livelihood that essentially does not exist, and that the existence of small organic farms is more a function of ideology than a reflection of market functions.

At any rate, while there are success stories here and there, for growers trying to stay small and sell mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, these success stories are very few and far between, and they depend on a precise combination of pre-existing capital, smart marketing, intelligent land and crop management, and hard work put into locating good markets. And even then, it’s the rare farm that manages to be the sole income source for a family.

In this economy, if you want to be a small farmer, it’s probably more practical to assume it will be an income-boosting hobby rather than your primary source of income, even if it is what you spend the majority of your time doing. I’ve run into this reality repeatedly over the time period that I’ve been engaged in the alternative food movement, and as a result, I’ve come to think of small-scale farming more as one of a diverse set of economic activities practiced by an individual or couple than as a primarily income-generating career occupation.

Maybe I’m getting worn down by the dominant economic system. And I’m certainly starting to think of market farming as being no different from running any small business in America — from a financial standpoint, if the business owner wants to keep her operation small, it’s by and large a losing proposition, and only one worth entering for quality-of-life reasons.

The exception is if one offers a high-end product that rich people will pay a lot for, thus enabling one to keep quantities small, quality high, and the business local and independent. Thus, someone entering small-scale farming, and expecting to stay small, should either develop a value-added product that she can sell at a high margin, or expect to be poor yet happy and work additional jobs to make ends meet.

Although the local foods movement does seem to be thriving, I haven’t seen an equivalent jump in the percentage of small farmers being able to base their entire livelihood on their farming occupation. I guess I’m glad there are a lot of people out there who are willing to farm on a small scale because it’s what they believe in, but I’m also sad that it’s so hard to make money farming. I’m also curious if others, possibly those living near higher-end markets like San Francisco or New York City, have seen an increase in farmers making a livable wage as the number of local consumers and the prices they pay for fresh produce rise.

]]>The limits of consumption-based food movementshttp://grist.org/article/dispatches-from-the-fields-whatever-happened-to-organic/
Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:02:52 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=25024]]>In “Dispatches From the Fields,” Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America’s agro-industrial landscape.

This Olathe Sweet Corn is regionally renowned, entirely local, and grown entirely conventionally and industrially, meaning farmers use large amounts of water, fertilizer, and pesticides. Its locality has become a selling point; should this be the case?

Photo: Stephanie Paige Ogburn

A few years ago at farmers markets here and around the country, most customers would ask a farmer how she grew her vegetables and herbs. Eaters were concerned about organic growing habits and pesticide use on farms, and inquired about the methods used to grow the produce they were purchasing.

Nowadays at market, almost no one asks if Dragonfly Farms is certified organic. (We’re not, but are pursuing Certified Naturally Grown status.) They don’t even ask if we use synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers.

Consumer priorities, and the questions buyers ask, have shifted. Now the main farm-production question I hear is related to place: “Where is your farm?”

Customers used to worry about how food was produced; now they worry about where it is from. This switch is both interesting and somewhat troubling. It’s interesting in part because it shows how the power of one captivating idea — local — can quickly eclipse the power of another — organic.

Local has become a selling point not only at farmers markets but also at mainstream, corporate grocery stores like City Market, owned by Kroger.

Photo: Stephanie Paige Ogburn

It’s troubling because, from the perspective of a movement against agribusiness-as-usual, organic farming has a lot more substance than local does. The organic farming movement has a history of opposing and actively questioning the status quo of Green Revolution — style, high yield, industrial agriculture. The movement largely formed itself in opposition to the Green Revolution, drawing on the strength of pioneers like Sir Albert Howard, Jerome Rodale, and the publication of books like Silent Spring in the early 1960s.

The organic movement confronted industrial agriculture’s use of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers that devastated local ecosystems. It addressed the health of migrant farm workers and the health of people who ate foods with pesticide residues or milk with growth hormones. Organic growers tried to imitate natural systems on their farms, and the science of agroecology grew out of this movement. The goal of early organic movement farmers was to one day feed the world through a system of cultivation that paid attention to landscape, ecology, and human health. Today, movement-style organic agriculture in the United States has largely disappeared, and its substitution, from a perspective of ecological or moral consumerism, has become the term “local.”

I could write a whole post, or even a book, on why and how this happened, but a significant part of organic’s decline is tied to the federal regulation of the term “organic” and the accompanying commoditization of the term, which distanced it from its movement origins and turned it into just another grocery-store label. The affiliation with the United States Department of Agriculture, and the USDA’s subsequent misguided approach to managing the organic program, caused many to lose faith in organic; at the same time, the strengthening of the term organic by making it a legally definable set of practices caused it to lose its power in the marketplace of ideas.

Let me be clear — I’m not holding present-day organic up as a model of engagement with the larger industrial system. The part of organic I miss, the part that specifically addressed problems in the larger industrial system, fell by the wayside a while ago, as soon as organic agriculture became primarily associated with commodities and consumption. After this happened, it was easily supplanted by another morals-based purchasing option — local food. That is, once the organic movement had become largely dissociated from organic products, the product (an organic widget versus a nonorganic widget) became the most important aspect of organic, leaving it vulnerable to being replaced by the next fad in eco-consumption.

At this moment, the rallying call within the alternative agriculture movement is the push for local food, which does not mean nearly the same as organic. The switch from a focus on organic to one on local, which I’ve watched happen over the past few years, causes me some consternation. My primary worry is that a local-oriented, consumer-based movement seems to avoid engaging with many of the problems associated with the industrial food system that organic as a movement specifically sought to address. Unlike organic, which did address flaws in industrial ag and then seemed to lose that critique once it became primarily a consumer movement, local has always been a consumer movement, and has never interacted much with the big picture of industrial ag. Thus, while many consumers seem to agree that it is “better” to buy local than not, most people do not seem to have thought through why this is, exactly. And therein lies the problem.

For me, there are a few important reasons for buying locally. Food is fresher and tastes better. Buying local food supports the hometown economy. Buying locally shortens the commodity chain, which opens up space for consumers to hold producers accountable for methods of production (which can range from use of pesticides to paying their laborers a fair wage). It also enhances the chance that producers will be fairly and adequately compensated for what they produce. (Think about the percentage of a dollar a tomato grower at farmers market keeps for a pound of her product versus the percentage a coffee farmer from Guatemala keeps for a pound of hers.)

These are my reasons for buying local food. If you ask lot of people at a farmers market, possibly the majority, why they buy locally, they will likely speak about freshness, and then say that it is better for the environment, mentioning something about food miles.

The concern with food miles is tied to climate change, with the general idea being that it takes less energy to produce and market food locally. Thus, fewer greenhouse gases are emitted buying a local apple than an apple from New Zealand. This, generally the primary argument for local agriculture, hinges upon an association with the transportation of food over long distances and climate change.

I find this problematic, mostly because a focus on buying locally avoids a critique of industrial agriculture from all perspectives except that of transportation. Theoretically, then, if one grew apples in Connecticut, using tons of pesticides (and believe me, tons of pesticides are used on apples), and employed poorly paid, undocumented workers who were exposed to said pesticides, but sold them within Connecticut to local consumers, these apples would be “better” than organic apples shipped from New Zealand.

Recent studies have questioned the true advantage of local from the climate-change perspective, noting that some regions have better growing conditions for certain products and thus use much less energy in their production, depending on season and how the products are shipped to their end markets. There’s a good encapsulation of these studies at Environmental Defense Fund’s blog, and Ethicurean has also tackled this topic. I’m not particularly interested in debating whether local food is more climate-friendly than regional or even internationally traded food, however. What concerns me most is that the alternative food movement has dropped out of its engagement with the way most of the food in this country is grown. I’ve watched this happen, as organic first became just another marketing sticker on a product, then faded into obscurity as local become the latest alt-ag end goal.

As this happened, the alternative food movement set up a system where the small percentage of people who shop locally happily buy their produce at the farmers market, while 99 percent of America’s farmland remains planted in genetically-modified crops, gets regularly sprayed with a chemical cocktail of ecologically devastating compounds, and produces the sort of food that turns children into Type 2 diabetics.

How can the alt-ag folks regain their critique of industrial agriculture and actually begin changing the system? I believe the movement is going to have to take the very difficult steps of moving outside the rather comfortable zone of being primarily a market-based movement, that is, one based on changing the system by relying primarily on consumer purchases to send a signal to producers to change. Sure, that type of movement has left us with a growing percentage of organic farmland, but farmers are also putting more land into industrial ag production too, taking marginal land out of conservation programs as commodity prices rise.

Right now, industrial ag seems to run around in its own world, planting more corn and soy monocultures, causing nitrogen runoff that ends up killing the Gulf of Mexico, and advocating for a bigger and better Green Revolution to solve the latest food crisis, while the alternative food movement happily twirls to the beat of its own drum, and the two never meet.

An obvious point of engagement was through the farm bill, which, sadly, utterly flopped in terms of any sort of reformation of the system. So what now?

From a producer standpoint, there doesn’t seem to be a ton of options. We grow organically; we sell locally — yet industrial agriculture persists and grows. That’s why I feel as if alternative ag needs to move outside of the producer-consumer sphere, outside of the marketplace, and back into the realm of policy, activism, and direct contact with the forces of agribusiness.From where I sit, that means getting in touch with some Colorado and southwestern groups who work toward making our regional forms of industrial agribusiness better, and helping those groups grow in strength — through donations, volunteering, letter-writing — whatever it takes. Here, industrial ag mostly revolves around the production of cheap beef, so that’s the force that I’ll be working to change. I challenge readers to think about where they can interact with the forces of industrial ag — and then to go forth, and engage.

It’s somewhat astonishing that there’s a thriving local food scene where I live, in Montezuma County, Colorado. Not because the area is poor, rural, and thus removed from the trendiness of the local food movement that has hit most large population centers — rather, because it’s so difficult to grow food here.

In a normal year, towns in Montezuma County get between 13 and 18 inches of precipitation. The growing season is short; although most of the region falls into zones 6a/5b on the USDA hardiness map, it frosted here on June 12 this year, and that’s not unusual. Temperature variation between day and night can easily range 40 degrees, as the thin desert air heats up with the sun but fails to retain any of that heat due to the lack of humidity.

So how do growers survive blistering desert-hot days in summer combined with a June that packs the one-two punch of no measurable precipitation and a killing frost twelve days into the month, as temperatures brush 90 during the day and plummet as soon as the sun sets?

There are two main answers to this problem in southwest Colorado. The answer to the problem of cold nights and late frosts is season extenders. These can range from the thin white material of floating row covers, which give plants an extra few degrees of warmth, to black plastics that cover the ground, heating the soil and keeping solar radiation in, to cold frames and unheated and heated greenhouse structures. It’s actually quite ingenious how some local growers have rigged their systems to produce tomatoes by mid-July and greens far into the winter months.

The answer to the other problem, that of low rainfall, is irrigation. Many local growers here own shares in the Montezuma Valley Irrigation Company. This company connects to the local reservoir, McPhee, the second-largest reservoir in Colorado. After growers get this water, I’ve seen them use a variety of irrigation methods, both here and in other parts of Western Colorado. The three main types are overhead sprinkler systems, furrow irrigation, which uses pipes at the top of a field to flood it with water, and drip irrigation systems, which are the most water efficient and deliver water that through seepage to the plant’s roots.

What intrigues me about these solutions to the difficulties of growing crops in southwest Colorado is that they both rely heavily on external inputs to essentially transform the high desert into a growing environment that is very far removed from its ecological character. Thus, extending the growing season and adding water — a lot of water — enables growers in this semi-arid region to produce almost exactly the same crops here that are grown in Iowa or Virginia. Although they are notoriously difficult to grow here, farmers do produce crops like tomatoes, eggplants, and bell peppers. Consumers expect these crops too, often asking in June why there aren’t any tomatoes yet.

Thus, the agricultural focus, even among small market growers, is not on finding seed varieties that thrive in a short growing season with cool nights and hot days, but rather on manipulating the existing environment so that it becomes a place where varieties developed in places with longer seasons and more water can be grown.

Of course, agriculture has always been about manipulating the environment in one form or another to get the earth to produce what you want. This style of growing is not unusual purely for the manipulation that takes place, then, but rather for the extent of the manipulation and the contrast to the type of agriculture that could exist here, an agriculture that could be much less reliant on such resource-intensive changes to the land.

This alternate way of growing relies more on working within the existing ecological system. It depends on finding varieties that can grow despite little rainfall. It also demands that close attention be paid to planting locations. Farmers would need to locate plots near rainwater collection spots on their land, allowing them to craft small scale, rainfed irrigation systems. These plots would also sit where the cool night air stays a bit warmer, in places like mesa tops, which are often warmer than canyon bottoms.

Not many people practice this sort of agriculture nowadays. Compared to the system we now have, it might sound difficult and impractical. But historically, the desert Southwest was practically a breadbasket of a highly developed agrarian society that’s now known as the Ancestral Puebloan civilization. (These people were formerly called the Anasazi.)

According to archaeologists, this region, which now supports 25,000 people, supported about 20,000 in its height, between A.D. 1000 and 1300. And they were all fed primarily locally, through a combination of agriculture and hunting/gathering.

I find this an interesting contrast to the current way local agriculture is practiced here. I’m not by any means advocating a return to the lifestyle of those who lived and thrived here 1,000 years ago. Nevertheless I do think a farmer willing to try growing desert-adapted foods and to pay close attention to the concept of place in her agricultural endeavor could grow a wide variety of interesting foods that would probably taste amazing, since they are adapted to this climate, and be much less resource intensive. This sort of agriculture would also cut down on a lot of the headaches that accompany growing here. As someone who grew up in the middle of the East Coast, I find it truly mentally taxing to fret about one’s tomato plants getting frosted well into June and then worry about them again as soon as September hits, while most of them are still green on the vine.

There’s an experiment going on at a nearby archaeological research and education center called Crow Canyon. Researchers there, working with American Indians whose ancestors lived and grew food in this region, have planted a dryland garden, part of a program called the Pueblo Farming Project. It will be interesting to see their results in growing crops under the guidance of American Indians who possess traditional agricultural seeds and know-how. Perhaps local farmers in the region will also take note.

As I return to my farm work this week, I plan to assist in the layout of a drip system for a new passive solar greenhouse at Dragonfly Farm, a project which incorporates both the growing tools of season extension and irrigation. This weekend I used sprinklers to irrigate the outdoor farm plot, giving the thirsty lettuce crop a much-needed drink.

In a few years, though, I’d like to be spending less time wrangling with irrigation and frantically covering up the nightshades on those June and September nights, and more time using my knowledge of place, plants, and history.

Native Seeds/SEARCH, the organization founded by Gary Nabhan, has a seed catalog with traditional varieties of the desert Southwest, and there are a lot of options there to purchase seeds adapted to this climate. Native plant harvesting is also a viable option; the pinyon-pine trees covering the region have long been a major source of calorie-rich pine nuts, and last year I collected many pounds of prickly pear tunas for personal use in syrups and juice. (The juice also makes a great addition to margaritas.)

The big question, though, is whether the nascent locavore culture is willing to accept a local food system that grows more tiny tomatoes than beefsteaks, more melons than mesclun mix. That sort of growing would make our food system much more sustainable, but it would require a significant cultural adjustment in terms of taste. As a grower, sowing more locally-adapted foods would lessen one’s ecological footprint while also reducing risk in terms of production, but it doesn’t matter if you have a bumper crop of tepary beans or tomatillos to sell at market if all customers want are juicy Brandywines and European salad greens.

]]>http://grist.org/article/dispatches-from-the-fields-from-tepary-beans-to-arugula-and-back/feed/0For some farmers, distant markets offer the best priceshttp://grist.org/article/dispatches-from-the-fields-the-far-in-farmers-markets/
Tue, 15 Jul 2008 02:45:02 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=24513]]>In “Dispatches from the Fields,” Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America’s agro-industrial landscape.

I don’t know how many different farmers markets readers have the opportunity to attend within one area. As a consumer, it seems reasonable to pick one and stick with it. But as a farmer, it’s a good idea to sell at multiple markets; it offers the opportunity to sell products at different times during the week as produce becomes available and also increases sales, since the farmer can reach that many more customers at each market.

Here in southwest Colorado, the farmer for whom I work attends no fewer than four markets per week. Two of them are fewer than 10 miles from the farm, and the other two are much further afield, requiring drives of 45 and 75 miles to reach. Interestingly, the market that is farthest away is also the most lucrative, and this got me thinking about farm location versus consumer location, a dynamic that makes the buy-local trend a little challenging.

Dragonfly Farm, the farm where I work, is located in Montezuma County, Colo. This is an economically depressed part of the state, where per capita income hovers around $17,000 and median income is right around $32,000. A well-paying job for someone with a bachelor’s degree would net about $35,000.

But Montezuma County’s surroundings vary wildly in terms of economic status. Just 75 miles up the road sits the hamlet and ski resort of Telluride, one of the few places in the United States where, as my friend Paul says, “you can buy a $3 million house at the end of a dirt road.” And the town of Durango, an up-and-coming Colorado resort location with rapidly-escalating home and land prices, lies just 45 miles to the east.

For farmers trying to make a living by growing and selling food in the area, it’s a constant challenge to balance selling to such widely disparate markets. Of course we want to sell locally and support our home markets. I work one of our local markets, in Cortez, Colo. I love working there because I see people I know, since I live there, and there’s a down-to-earth clientele. But this local clientele doesn’t necessarily fit the typical farmers market demographic of educated consumers. They still don’t know much about “exotic” vegetables like kale and broccoli raab, and they complain when a fresh, homemade cinnamon roll (size large) costs $3. Teresa, my employer, recently recounted to me a story of what happened to her at our other local market.

At this market, a man came up to her and discovered she was charging $3 for bagged spinach, grown organically. This man informed her that he could buy spinach for cheaper than that at Wal-Mart. Obviously he can, and he didn’t understand that produce at a farmers market has any number of advantages to produce purchased at Wal-Mart. At the local markets, this sort of price shock is not uncommon.

Often the local old-timers come to market expecting that buying at a farmers market means everything costs half of the grocery store price, which is an interesting comment on what farmers markets used to mean versus what they mean now. Of course, there are probably people like this at every market in the country. But it’s the contrast between our local markets and those further away that I find so interesting.

See, on Fridays, when Teresa makes the 90-minute drive up to Telluride to work the market there, growers charge $6 per bag of spinach, and cups of cold lemonade fly off the tables at $4 a glass. The people she sells to there are mostly vacationers or second, third, or fourth home owners who spend a couple weeks from in Telluride from time to time. But they’re willing to pay a high price for quality goods, and farmers can certainly appreciate customers like that. On the other hand, it’s not as if, by selling at Telluride, we’re really encouraging local people to eat healthy, fresh food close to home. I would venture to say that most of the farmers who sell in Telluride live at least as far away from there as we do, possibly farther. (The market limits itself to vendors up to 200 miles from Telluride; in contrast, the Boulder Farmers Market limits itself to farmers in Boulder County, Colo., with a few exceptions.)

It’s a paradox that many small farms face; the markets most local to them are either unable or unwilling to support the prices farmers need to charge in order to remain viable. So, like Teresa, farmers travel longer distances to sell to the wealthy, who are willing to pay and keep the small farms in business. It makes me a little sad that farmers like my friend Mary, who grow great food and are committed to selling purely locally, struggle; those who are willing to sell extra-locally in places like Telluride and Durango are the ones who are really making it.

This phenomenon probably has a lot to do with land prices. There are more small farmers in Montezuma County than in other parts of southwest Colorado like nearby Durango, because land prices in Montezuma County are cheaper. But land prices are cheaper because the economy is poor, and so farmers grow amazing vegetables and other food on their (relatively) cheap land and then travel elsewhere to sell it.

Unfortunately, land prices in Montezuma County are also skyrocketing as retirees and second homeowners move in to what has been marketed as a relatively mild climate in a beautiful setting, “where the desert meets the mountains,” as the tourism brochure claims.

This trend could end up changing the landscape over time, as young farmers won’t be able to purchase agricultural land at affordable prices.

There’s a lot of room for the situation to change, though, even in poor places like Montezuma County. The total estimated food expenditures in Montezuma County for 2003, according to a report compiled by the Sustainability Alliance of Southwest Colorado, was over $54 million [PDF]. The total expenditures for farmers market-type goods like eggs, dairy, and fresh fruits and vegetables ran to just over $13 million.

So yes, we’re a poor county, but we still eat. The challenge for those who are committed to selling only locally seems to be figuring out a way to tap into that market and change purchasing habits so that more locals believe paying $3 for a bag of spinach is a solid investment in both their health and in local farm businesses. While it’s the old-timers at market that do a lot of the complaining about prices, I see the real potential for change in reaching those younger, mid- to lower-income customers who don’t even make it to the market right now. As the Cortez Farmers Market gains in popularity, I think this may be happening, but it’s a slow shift.

]]>USDA Seeks to fill enviro slot on Organic Boardhttp://grist.org/article/wanted-one-good-environmentalist/
http://grist.org/article/wanted-one-good-environmentalist/#respondWed, 18 Apr 2007 02:06:39 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=16972]]>The United States Department of Agriculture seeks to fill an “environmentalist” slot on the National Organic Standards Board, an opening announced in an April 16th press release. Why should you care? The NOSB makes recommendations to the USDA on what is allowable under USDA Organic Standards. Cloned animals? Recombinant DNA? Sewage sludge? The Board influenced all the decisions to keep these substances out, and will make important future recommendations as well.

Fair Trade producers in Mexico depend heavily on organic certification to reap price premiums for both labels, and will be hurt on more than one front by the recently released USDA rule requiring them to change certification practices, researchers say. In a recent article in Salon, later followed by a post on Gristmill, Samuel Fromartz detailed the consequences of a USDA ruling that would force a radical change in the way grower groups in the global South certify their products. The USDA ruling, Fromartz writes:

[T]ightens organic certification requirements to such a degree that it could sharply curtail the ability of small grower co-ops to produce organic coffee — not to mention organic bananas, cocoa, sugar and even spices.

In his blog on the subject, Fromartz says he only hit the tip of the iceberg. So I hunted around a bit, seeking to find out more about how the ruling would impact producers in developing nations. I contacted Aimee Shreck and Christy Getz, two researchers who have published on organic and Fair Trade in developing nations. And notably, I got in touch with Tad Mutersbaugh, a professor of geography at the University of Kansas. Mutersbaugh’s research focuses on international certification standards, and he’s worked with organic and Fair Trade certified grower groups in Oaxaca, Mexico. He was familiar with the recent USDA ruling, and expressed his concern about the implications the ruling would have for small farmers in organic and Fair Trade grower groups.

In the email exchange we had, Mutersbaugh made a distinction that I had not yet heard. It is written in the USDA ruling, and refers to grower groups’ use of “internal inspectors” versus “external inspectors.”

Internal inspectors generally come from the region they certify, but are specially educated by the larger grower organization in how to certify farms. They are usually true believers in the organic project, says Mutersbaugh, and work for low wages in order to get the job done, charging as little as $1 per inspection. In contrast, external inspectors cost $150 per day, and are also much slower.

“I once attended an external inspection where we managed to do four fields in a day (at $150/day rate) because the inspector simply could not take all of the walking,” Mutersbaugh wrote in an email message. “I then went on an internal inspection where we literally ran down through a canyon and up a mountain, performing 10 inspections in a day at the cost of just $1 per inspection!”

But the USDA ruling prohibits use of internal inspectors, a move that, according to Mutersbaugh, will have dire consequences for small-scale producers. “The only way to do inspections is by using ‘internal inspectors’,” he said. “If external inspectors are used, the cost will be absolutely prohibitive.”

Costs are a big deal to small growers involved in these cooperative groups. Mutersbaugh notes that the $15 organic premium per 100 pound sack can significantly help these farmers, who often earn less than $1,000 a year. He also notes that many of these farmers are indigenous women whose husbands have migrated in search of work. And, Mutersbaugh says, because only a percentage of Fair Trade coffee is actually sold as Fair Trade, since the supply of Fair Trade exceeds the demand, the organic certification is that much more important for these growers.

Organic certification, Mutersbaugh writes, “is … the key for farmers who want to get Fair Trade market access. If they produce coffee that is ‘double certified’ as Fair Trade and organic, and their coffee is gourmet quality, they will gain market access. This is why farmers spend so much — and it really is costly — to gain access to Fair Trade Certified/organic markets.”

In response to worries about organic standards being broken, Mutersbaugh admits this is a “concern” not held only by the USDA — Mexican grower groups worry about it as well. But external certification has its own problems. Mutersbaugh cites an example where a village had been offered certification by an external inspector, but without actual inspections. “Basically,” Mutersbaugh said, “the external inspector would simply invent the paperwork! These [organizations] have come to be called ‘chafa’ (as in wheat chaff) certifiers, but they pose a real challenge.”

Mutersbaugh hammered home two points related to corruption and certification:

“Internal inspectors do not, in my experience, certify their own villages: They certify other villages outside of their regional organizations.”

“Internal inspectors are accredited. They must receive training and pass examinations approved by the national level certifier.”

Mutersbaugh also tied the USDA ruling into the bigger picture of international conservation, development, and the global economy. He wondered why it took ten years for the organic price premium to increase by five cents a pound. (In June of 2007, the price for a 100-pound sack of organic coffee will jump from $15 to $20.) The cost for certification over this 10-year time period has “skyrocketed,” he said, but “this price is simply not reflective of … the cost to certify.”

In addition to this, he added, certified-organic producer families are often key partners in crafting conservation infrastructure. These farmers not only produce coffee, but also habitat. Their fields and conserved lands offer water filtration services, and their conservation support preserves biodiversity and endangered species. Grassroots environmentalists in Mexico often work with networks of certified organic growers to preserve prime conservation land. “What of the songbirds protected, butterflies?” he asked.

Mutersbaugh offered a two-part compromise as a way to alleviate some of the USDA’s concerns and strengthen certification processes:

There should be a “thoroughgoing accreditation process” for internal inspectors, he said. This would allow internal inspectors to be accredited by external bodies, therefore making the system more credible, but still affordable.

The organic premium should be increased to $30 a sack (30 cents a pound) “so that internal inspectors can afford to be inspectors rather than migrants to the U.S” Many good inspectors, he said, leave the business because it is such a low-paying and thankless job. A premium increase to 40 dollars a sack would be a “better bet,” he adds, but he doesn’t think that’s realistic.

But as Mutersbaugh and the other researchers I contacted noted, barriers to entry in organic production are high, and U.S. consumers need to be willing to compensate grower groups in order to help them develop the infrastructure needed to support organic. If it takes 40 dollars a sack — well, for U.S. consumers, that’s just 25 cents more per pound than we’re paying now. “Imagine,” Mutersbaugh says, “getting a raise only once a decade!”

It’s harder to view oil and gas workers as disposable when their stories are told. And that’s what Ray Ring does in the latest issue of High Country News. In a special report, Ring painstakingly documents the stories of oil and gas boom workers who have lost their lives and limbs in the past six years, all in the service of cheap energy. I won’t quote much here, since the story simply must be read, but here’s an small excerpt:

Workers get crushed by rig collapses, they fall off the steel ledges and the maze of catwalks and ladders and walkways, they get caught in spinning chains, winches and cables. Sometimes they get strangled by their own fall-protection harnesses. On or off the rigs, they handle flammables, and sometimes they get fireballed. They succumb to poisonous hydrogen sulfide, which occurs in natural gas before it’s processed; one whiff is fatal. They get slammed by valves and pipes that explode under high pressure. They get hit by lightning, freeze to death and die of heat stroke, because the work takes place outside, and it goes on 24/7, 365 days a year, pretty much no matter what.

And Ring documents and tells all these stories in all their painful, gruesome, and important detail. Other great reports have been written on the human costs of the Interior West’s oil and gas boom, many in the HCN’s pages, but Ring’s 10,000-word odyssey is one of the best I’ve read. He uses FOIAed information as well as personal accounts to craft a truly compelling narrative. There’s a heartbreaking and poignant table listing all 89 deaths and their causes along with the article, and a photo gallery as well. If you live out West, I recommend picking up a copy in a bookstore, or if you don’t and are interested, you should contact HCN’s circulation department to ask for one — the print version is just that much better.

]]>http://grist.org/article/the-human-costs-of-oil-and-gas/feed/0Crafting a culture of changehttp://grist.org/article/slow-food-nation/
http://grist.org/article/slow-food-nation/#respondFri, 06 Apr 2007 02:55:03 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=16812]]>Yale University students, staff, and other community members crowded a university conference room yesterday to watch Erika Lesser, director of Slow Food USA, give a talk on the Slow Food movement in America. Lesser spoke pretty generally about Slow Food USA’s goals, philosophy, and achievements. The talk was interesting in itself, but there were two aspects that I found particularly significant:

Lesser made some very interesting connections between Slow Food and American environmentalism (more on this below).

It was a horribly cold, rainy, awful day, the talk was located in an incredibly out-of-the-way part of campus, yet nonetheless the room was packed.

Slow Food, so the story goes, was founded by Italians who rallied around a protest against a McDonalds in Rome. From what I previously knew about Slow Food (two of my colleagues conduct research on the European-based organization), I had perceived it as a movement focused primarily on taste and preserving heirloom or heritage foods.

Yet in this talk, Lesser made some important links between Slow Food and the environmental movement. She spoke specifically about “eco-gastronomy,” a term she used to link taste and pleasure with a wider ecological consciousness. Eco-gastronomy bridges the gap from the taste-based, European movement to the American eco-conscious audience, an important step for Slow Food USA. “We realized that, going back to the early days of Slow Food, that pleasure, and good flavor, is not enough,” she said. So Slow Food moved up the taste ladder to a wider focus on ecology and environmentalism.

“If we wanted to preserve the pleasure that was on our plates,” Lesser stressed, “we had to pay attention to the origins of our food. But not just the origins, but the whole system that the food came from. And the system is our ecology.”

This linking of taste and ecology in the form of eco-gastronomy is a key step forward in the merging of food politics with environmental issues. In a continuation of this theme, Lesser went on to talk about Slow Food’s Ark of Taste, which is essentially an endangered species list for foods. Importantly, only tasty foods are allowed entry onto the Ark — Slow Food, like enviros, has a weakness for charismatic species.

What struck me about Lesser’s talk were the fascinating ways in which Slow Food has borrowed from the successes of the environmental movement, and also recognized and tried to avoid environmentalism’s failures. Lesser talked about Americans’ Puritanical tendencies, and how Slow Food is not about denial but about pleasure. This was an explicit nod to the part of environmentalism’s history that based itself in self-denial (bike don’t drive, save don’t shop, eat vegetables not meat), and how Slow Food rejects this type of denial, opting instead for a full-on embrace of the sensual and pleasurable.

Yet Slow Food’s brilliance comes from its embrace of what does work in environmentalism. The genius involved in creating an Endangered Species List of foods is one example. Interdisciplinary connection-making is another. Lesser gave an example of this when she spoke about Slow Food USA’s partnership with a small group of poultry breeders in Pittsboro, N.C.: American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. This group works to preserve heritage breeds of domesticated poultry, and has been around since 1977. According to Lesser, the Conservancy had remained a somewhat marginal organization until their partnership with Slow Food catalyzed a new type of market connection for them — a connection focused on history, small farming, and taste.

Another fascinating part of Lesser’s talk was her introduction of a specific movement vocabulary. “It’s always about story-telling in Slow Food,” she said, and this was evident in her presentation. Slow Food has specifically cultivated a “creation myth” that tells an inspirational founding story. (We have Rachel Carson, Slow Food has Carlos Petrini.) It crafts a specific language for its members, calling chapter groups “convivia,” and its activist food protection projects “presidia,” from the Latin word for “fort.”

Essentially, Slow Food crafts a culture around its movement. It not only has its own values, but it creates new words to embody these values, giving movement members a cultural vocabulary. A key difference between Slow Food and general environmental activist groups seems to be the focus on crafting a rich sense of history, culture, and pleasure around the movement. Since a particular interest of mine (and others, I imagine) is imagining and crafting ways to make eco-consciousness more palatable and relevant to a wider audience, this might be something worth pondering further.

Finally, here’s a shout-out to the talk’s sponsor: Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.This Center is home to Kelly Brownell, a professor whose fascinating work focuses on obesity and the psychology of food. (I was first introduced to Brownell’s work in a story I heard on NPR a while back.) He and Lesser have both done work with Marion Nestle, an NYU professor who’s written a few important books about food.

Grassroots organic is alive and well, even in the concrete jungles of New Haven and Boston. Today I spent an hour and a half at a talk called “Food Policy: Addressing Social Justice in the Sustainable and Local Food Movements.” The event’s keynote speakers were two women who work for urban sustainable food initiatives.

One of the organizations, CitySeed, is located in New Haven, Conn. At the talk, CitySeed’s executive director, Jennifer McTiernan, spoke about how her organization works with Connecticut politicians to give low-income eaters access to fresh food and urban farmers’ markets.

The other organization, The Food Project, hails from Boston, and works to integrate urban youth into their network of small scale organic production. Their speaker was a woman named Rebecca Nemec, who works as a policy fellow for the Project.

Since I’ve been mired in the rural producer side of organic farming for a while, it was a refreshing change to hear these women speak about thriving urban agriculture and their efforts to integrate that into the social justice movement. McTiernan’s organization, CitySeed, is responsible for the explosive growth of farmers markets in New Haven.

But beyond that, CitySeed addresses the economic justice side of sustainable food. Recently, the organization worked with local Connecticut representatives to change bus routes so that public buses serving low-income neighborhoods go by grocery stores, rather than simply corner stores — thereby increasing access to fresh foods for those without cars.

CitySeed’s also been lobbying to increase funding for senior citizen coupons to farmers markets. Because of funding constraints, only 18,000 senior citizens in Connecticut receive the coupons, called Farmers Market Nutrition Coupons, although 55,000 seniors in the state are eligible. CitySeed is working to change that. And CitySeed-run markets were the first in the state to accept EBT/food stamps and WIC coupons at their farmers markets. Of course, the organic food at the markets is still more expensive than conventional food at the grocery store, but the group’s doing their best to make fresh, local, organic food available to eaters of all incomes.

The Food Project takes a different approach. They recruit urban Boston school kids and set them to work in organic gardens. The project involves the students in the entire food-to-table process, from harvesting peppers for an urban farmers market to pickling cucumbers to sell as a value-added organic product. They talk explicitly with the students about issues like justice, poverty, and diversity, as well as the importance of eating well and caring for the earth.

Both of these organizations recognize that they still have a long way to go. Later on in the discussion, McTiernan acknowledged that CitySeed lacks diversity in both their board and staff. She gave an example of an attempt the group made to recruit a minority single mother, but the woman was simply too busy to become involved in their efforts. So CitySeed still lacks in social and cultural diversity, and the farmers market food remains too pricey for many New Haven residents — hurdles McTiernan said were difficult to overcome.

The Food Project’s Nemec cited a problem that particularly struck me. While the photos she showed of high school workers looked like posters for a pro-diversity campaign, she had a confession to make: “We cannot,” she said, “retain males from the city.” And by this, I was pretty sure she meant black youth. Which is tragic, and provocative.

When a thriving organization that recruits urban Boston schoolchildren from all walks of life fails so specifically with one sector of the population … well, it just makes one wonder about the plight of all these young urban men. And I know that seems unrelated to the sustainable food movement, but that simple acknowledgment was the part of the presentation that stuck with me.

Overall, however, it was a fascinating presentation on the many ways small groups in the sustainable food movement are taking on justice issues from all different angles and perspectives. So that’s something to keep in mind the next time you hear someone saying organic food is only for eco-elite.

]]>http://grist.org/article/equal-opportunity-organic/feed/0I heart David Tilmanhttp://grist.org/article/i-heart-david-tilman/
http://grist.org/article/i-heart-david-tilman/#respondWed, 28 Mar 2007 00:30:44 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=16655]]>Tilman on biofuels in Sunday’s Washington Post: eminently readable and reasonable on parsing the differences between good and bad biofuels, drops in ethanol production in Brazil, what renewable really means, and where we should go from here.

The op-ed’s based on his December Science study, which was discussed here. Everything he writes makes so much sense. Why can’t all scientists be this articulate?

Dave Foreman spills his guts on the difference between real conservationists and the rest of us, who are interested in saving the environment for utilitarian reasons here, urging a return to conservation’s roots in the preservation of wildness for its own sake, and slamming utilitarian environmental approaches to conservation. I actually thought the movement had gotten past this debate; apparently I was wrong.

Key phrase:

… [N]ature conservationists who work to protect wilderness areas and wild species should be called conservationists, and … resource conservationists, who wish to domesticate and manage lands and species for the benefit and use of humans, should be called resourcists.

When environmentalists turn their attention from the so-called “built environment” to nature, they can take either a conservationist or a resourcist pathway. I’ve named environmentalists who have a utilitarian resourcist view “enviro-resourcists.”

And I’ve ruffled some feathers with this view.

I’ve ruffled even more feathers lately by warning that enviro-resourcists have been slowing gaining control of conservation groups, thereby undercutting and weakening our effectiveness, and that nature lovers need to take back the conservation family.

Now, I attend a graduate school founded by Gifford Pinchot, utilitarian extraordinaire, and about 70 percent of the students at my school are studying to become environmental managers — exactly the type of resourcist Foreman rails against, and the type of utilitarian manager who he claims is slowly taking over the major environmental organizations. (And he’s right about that.)

While parts of Foreman’s argument appeal to me, because flower-filled alpine meadows inspire my soul, I nonetheless think that his argument about the intrinsic value of nature can be a dangerous one, particularly when exported to the developing world, which is where a lot of conservation is taking place.

Yet Foreman persists, stating that the “resourcist” turn in conservation is a major problem:

[A] growing number of conservation group leaders do not themselves believe in nature for its own sake. David Johns writes in an email message that “some conservationists seem to be not just using anthropocentric arguments to advance rewilding goals, but are, in fact, backing off of rewilding goals in favor of sustainable development nonsense.”

Now, I thought the resourcist turn was actually a positive move on environmentalism’s part, one urged by conservation workers such as Mac Chapin and well-covered by Grist and others.

One could argue that the reason we have this “sustainable development nonsense” is that when Westerners impose their “intrinsic” values on impoverished indigenous communities, we often end up impoverishing them more, and ignoring the factors that led to deforestation and resource overuse in the first place. Resource extraction is going to go on because humans need resources. There are better and worse ways to extract these resources, and at least resourcists are trying to find the better way.

Yet at the same time, Foreman’s argument appeals, because so many American enviros came to the movement from a love of the wild, and do believe that there is an intrinsic value in, say, a field of glacier lilies. But is anyone other than Foreman arguing that conservationists/environmentalists return to the intrinsic love of the wild when making policy? Are his rants just a shard of remaining Thoreauvian romanticism/Western colonialism, or do a lot of people still think this way? Thoughts?